Last Friday (18th May 18) I attended Redgate’s SQL Privacy Summit in London. Before I go any further, for those of you who don’t know me, I’m based in the UK so GDPR is very much in the forefront of our minds and I am a Friend of Redgate. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend all day … Read more
Maintaining database security can be a complex task. In this post, Louis Davidson describes a method that can be used to maintain separate security for multiple environments (e.g., production and development) without changes to the database itself. … Read more
Currently the project I’m working on is using Azure’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and we want to move to using Azure SQL Database on Platform as a Service (PaaS). The one thing stopping us doing that was cross database scripting, known in Azure terms as an Elastic Query. Before we agreed the move to … Read more
On 25th May GDPR comes into force. I’ve been learning everything I can about GDPR to ensure my systems adhere to the regulations and will be attending Redgate’s SQL Privacy summit, details and registration here on Friday 18th May in London . However I’ve been really shocked at the amount of developers I know who … Read more
On May 19, a very busy day for SQL Saturday events (Atlanta, Dallas, and New York in the US, and Kyiv, Catania and Belo Horizonte elsewhere), I will be speaking in Atlanta on a subject that I am becoming more and more interested in: Hierarchies. This is the abstract: How to Implement a Hierarchy in … Read more
I am one of the organisers of SQLBits and this year we decided to make some real effort with the Community Corner. Craig Porteous (@CPorteous) happened to offer to help at a time when we were considering how to make that happen. Craig runs Glasgow User Group and SQL GLA which ran for the first … Read more
I am a firm advocate of commenting code, but you need to make sure that you are commenting the right thing. I worked on a project last year and then the project was paused. I’m now back on it full time, some 6 months later. I wrote most of the database code and all calls … Read more
I have finally decided to start blogging and Redgate have kindly given me a platform to do it. So, what am I going to blog about? Well pretty much anything and everything that I come across that is vaguely SQL Server related. Hopefully a lot of Azure content while I’m getting to grips with it. … Read more
The other day, a person I work with was creating some fairly complex CHECK constraints to protect data in a new table that was being created (a practice I am 100% for: https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/blogs/eliminating-annoying-space-characters-via-check-constraints/. The multiple constraints were combined into just one, with several conditions condensed into a single Boolean expression, using several ANDs, ORs, and … Read more
Every so often, I want to try a new location to go to, and possibly speak at, a SQL Saturday event. This year, my new experience will be to go to Jacksonville, FL for their event. It will only be the second time I have been in the city, the first time being on my … Read more
This week, I had a problem where I needed to find and eliminate from the results of my query, data with overlapping ranges. I have written about this topic before, in my database design book book, in regards to building a trigger to avoid overlapping ranges. But even though I have written on the topic … Read more
This week’s blog is a just about a few simple SQLCMD mode tricks for SSMS, but these tricks have saved me a lot of heartache over the years. If you have not used SQLCMD mode, you probably should be. I don’t intend to introduce SQLCMD too deeply, because there are tons of articles out there … Read more
I am working through my OneNote folder of blog ideas, and this one, while being one of the least consequential of them, was the most interesting tonight (and just may help you one day when converting data some day when you are wondering what the heck just happened in a query). You probably know that … Read more
Along with designing databases, I do a lot of ETL from, well, let’s call them “third party systems that I did not design or implement.” That may seem arrogant, but hey, I write books about database design so I should at least seem like I am able to do things right. In either case, when … Read more
In this blog, I want to explore what you can do to block the owner of a database from doing stuff in the database they “own”. Own is a strange term, because really there is just one user that is listed as owner, but there are there are three users who essentially are owner level, … Read more
Stored Procedures give you more freedom than functions, and so they would be the obvious way of developing processes in SQL Server. There is one longstanding problem with them though, although it is possible to send several results to the application from a stored procedure and read them without problems, you have big problems capturing more … Read more
In Microsoft Dynamics 365, by default, database is optimized for database record storage and not for files or attachment storage. Hence, cost effective storage management of huge sized data files becomes one of the most critical aspects for the organizational users. This blog narrating the process of optimizing storage capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM … Read more
I recently migrated an old .NET Framework 4.5.2 app to .NET Core 2.0. This isn’t a guide to that process and certainly isn’t an exhaustive list of all the things that can go wrong, but rather provides an account of what worked for me, where the pitfalls were, and whether it was worth it. The … Read more
Update: the schedule is out there, and as we promised, the topics are diverse. http://www.musiccitycode.com/sessions/ The conference starts in just two weeks (Music City Data sessions are all on Saturday), so if you are a developer using data, agile, and really most any programming technologies, in driving distance to Nashville, you still have time to easily prod … Read more
Everyone needs deadlines. Even the beavers. They loaf around all summer, but when they are faced with the winter deadline, they work like fury. If we didn’t have deadlines, we’d stagnate. ― Walt Disney I hate deadlines. Really. I truly hate them. The problem is: they are usually unrealistic, often not much more than a wild … Read more
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