This weekend, I will be taking the short 7.5 hour drive up to Indianapolis, IN for my second SQL Saturday in Indianapolis. I will be speaking on my favorite topic, Database Design, hoping to give at least a few people the secrets of how to design their database if so if I ever have to … Read more
I have a great interest in hierarchy solutions, as I plan to write a book on implementing hierarchies in SQL Server in the next year or so (after I see what happens in SQL Server vNext after 2017). Something I didn’t include in my design testing when I built my presentation on hierarchies (available from … Read more
In any real numeric data from a database , you are only rarely going to see any sort of normal distribution of the values. Sales data will rise and fall according to the time of year and the economic cycle. The date of input of a record will vary with the workload. If you plot … Read more
When you are developing an existing database, or demonstrating it, you nowadays need pseudonymised data, or even better, completely anonymized data. This data has to look right at first glance, and it needs to have the same distribution as the real data. Although we are yet to tackle continuous variables with complicated distributions such as … Read more
Coming up this weekend, I will be at my 10th SQL Saturday 729 in Louisville, KY. My topic will be row level security and dynamic data masking. Implementing Row Level Security in SQL Server Since the early days of SQL Server, it has been possible to use basic security measures to allow (and disallow) user … Read more
Being a database administrator is much more than knowing how to install SQL Server and set up a database. One of the most important responsibilities is being proactive by monitoring the instances in their care. But, what should be monitored? Here are the top five things to monitor when you are a SQL Server DBA: … Read more
Many times I’ve been told, by developers who are using live data to develop a database, that it is impossible to anonymise or pseudonymize their data to comply with privacy legislation. One recurring explanation is that one can’t duplicate the distribution of data by faking it. In a sense, this is true, because if you … Read more
This year I decided that I wanted to give more back to the community in the way of sharing my (limited) knowledge. The first thing I did was talk to the folks at Redgate and started blogging. I haven’t presented a session for a while because I’m usually too busy organising events but I decided … Read more
Today’s blog post is in response to Bert Wagner’s invitation here: https://bertwagner.com/2018/07/03/code-youd-hate-to-live-without-t-sql-tuesday-104-invitation/. For me, the answer was pretty simple. There is one piece of code that I have written that I find very useful, and even more… it was my (as far as I know, my own idea!) In my life, I have obviously learned a … Read more
I don’t know if I can put into words how much I appreciate this award, so I won’t try too hard. I will say that feels really weird to be happening in July. For the first 13 years I had the award, the announcement was my kind of unofficial launch of the holidays in early … Read more
How should you store the information you need to understand the information in your relational databases? Or rather, how should you store the information your new developers need, that your compliance team requires, that your business wants? With extended properties, Microsoft gave us a mechanism in SQL Server to add metadata to database objects. Extended … Read more
I’m in the process of setting up a new environment using Azure SQL Databases, previously in Azure we’ve just used an Azure VM with SQL Server on it. I’m also fairly new to setting up a Continuous Integration environment and in-house we use Team City, so in this blog and probably the next few I’m going … Read more
Assumptions are generally terrible things for programmers (and likely my next “What Counts” blog goes there), because what looks to be true when trying things out on your machine, may not be so at a larger scale. There are lots of examples out there, sorting when there’s a clustered index, not checking errors because you … Read more
I’ve just started a project where I’ve had to set up Team City from scratch. Whilst I’ve used Team City extensively I’ve never had to start from the beginning, so I thought I’d document the steps I took. TeamCity is a Continuous Integration tool is free to use for small teams. It connects to your … Read more
I often joke that I wish cloning was perfected so that I could be two places at once. Sometimes, it is hard to decide which opportunity is more important, for example, my niece’s graduation party ended on up the same day as a concert with my favourite band. My ticket included a meet and greet … Read more
As the saying goes: do to others as you would have them do to you. When writing code, I would suggest a complimentary saying of “do to yourself as you would to do others”. Write your software as if it will be used by a very wide audience, even if you aren’t planning on being the … Read more
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
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