UPDATE: Read the full report here. Recently, over 800 participants across a range of sectors and from all around the globe took part in a survey about the state of SQL Server monitoring. This survey from Redgate Software is the only one of its kind and is in its second year. Here are some significant … Read more
I nowadays enjoy working with front-end developers using JavaScript, especially now that SQL Server has the tools that allow the SQL Developer to accommodate their requirements. There is less tension now, because if the SQL Server developer can deliver exactly what they need, then there is less temptation to allow users access to base tables, … Read more
My dad and I had a very interesting and complex relationship. Some of this was due to his complex upbringing. His father was an alcoholic who died fairly early in his life, and his mom, well, his mom liked me a lot, but she was a messed up woman in many ways. After his father … Read more
Coming up this weekend, I will be in Virginia Beach, VA for their first ever SQL Saturday event. I have strong ties to the area, as the company I work for is located there, and they are helping me out to be able to come in for the event at a more reasonable pace than … Read more
Ok, so I have been, and will mostly stay, in a bit of blog hibernation. I am super busy trying to finish up a rather large number of tasks (a few chapters in a book, 2 more SQL Saturdays, and as much theme park time as I can get in before the end of June, … Read more
As a companion script with my recent article about Scripting out several databases on a server, here is a similar script that either scripts out the data for the SQL Server tables you specify as insert statements, or else as native BCP files if they are too large for insert statements. The purpose of scripting out the … Read more
MongoDB has a prodigious appetite for unstructured data and has its place in a Database Developer’s toolkit. Even with indexes in place, some operations that involve aggregation are a lot slower than they are with relational databases: So it is when using ‘joins’ between collections. Lookup, the MongoDB equivalent to Joins, cannot yet do Merge … Read more
SQL Saturday Jacksonville this weekend! Coming up this weekend, on the least holiest, but still very awesome holiday (May the Fourth), I will be in Jacksonville, Florida delivering a couple of sessions. Now, you might say: “Louis, why would you be travelling on May 4?” Check out the logo for Jacksonville’s event: That’s right, since … Read more
In today’s world, a user interacts with various apps/websites which require them to login or sign up via using their email address. There are a high chances of a person forgetting the username and the associated password to login or just completely giving up the sign up process as it asks a lot of information. … Read more
It is all to easy to build a database on a server and then expect it to be fully functional. Not so fast: There are a number of possibilities in terms of server-based functionality that can defeat you. Databases are likely to have scheduled jobs and alerts, and may have server triggers or even message … Read more
While I was preparing an article, I faced the challenge to extract the path from a filename in SQL Server. It’s an interesting challenge with many possible uses, so I decided to create a function to solve this problem. The Main Expression First, let’s understand the main expression to solve the problem. The path is everything … Read more
From SQL Server 2017, it becomes more practical to use JSON arrays for representing and processing a matrix. SQL Server can read them, and update values in them but can’t create them. To do this, you have to create the JSON as a string. The great advantage of them is that you can pass them … Read more
One of the common problems when you are developing databases is knowing what’s changed and when. You want to detect changes and to work out what has changed in a particular build. You’d have thought it would be an easy problem, when you consider that every database object in SQL Server’s system views has a … Read more
A few weeks ago, a coworker had a scenario where he was trying to import a large amount of data into some format (I think it was JSON, but I think it was a special limitation… that isn’t really important to the solution), and it didn’t allow certain characters. Narrowing down what the bad character … Read more
If you’ve been to a conference over the last few years, you’ve probably come across microservices. A microservice architecture consists of many highly decoupled services that are independently deployable and organized around business capabilities. This isn’t a new idea, SOA had similar ideas in the 90’s but the technology around it was clunky (it seemed … Read more
In order for a database system to work, you often need to provide programmable server objects. I’ve written very few databases that didn’t include agent jobs and triggers, or that didn’t require XEvents for diagnostics. These need to be scripted out in just the same way as database objects. . It can be done via … Read more
A while ago, I wrote an article Automated Script-generation with Powershell and SMO about using SMO to script out a SQL Server database. It has remained surprisingly but agreeably popular. SMO is still there, but now part of the sqlserver module that is included with SSMS and downloadable. Someone recently asked me whether it was … Read more
Each year, Redgate runs a survey to ask the folks at companies, from DBAs and Devs to CIOs, about how they monitor SQL Server. Those insights help us understand how we can make SQL Monitor more valuable to DBAs – or anyone responsible for the “care and feeding” of a SQL Server. The Estate Management … Read more
This is my first blog in a while and I’m sorry it’s not a technical one. You may be aware but I’m one of the SQLBits organisers which means that for the last few months all my spare time has been devoted to SQLBits organisation. We were really pleased with how the event went and … Read more
I am in the middle of a project to enable our corporate databases to work with continuous integration using RedGate SQL Automation (and hopefully get a few blogs/articles out of it too.) One of the things that the tool does is create your database in multiple ways, with multiple names, in order to compare to … Read more
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