Robert Sheldon Questions about SQL Server Data Types You were Too Shy to Ask Although SQL Data Types seem to cause a lot of grief for database developers and can be tricky in their... 14 July 2014 41 min read
Dwain Camps Calculating and Verifying Check Digits in T-SQL A lot of numbers that we use everyday such as Bank Card numbers, Identification numbers, and ISBN codes, have check... 11 July 2014 24 min read
Jonathan Lewis Execution Plans Part 7: Query Blocks and Inline Views When we examine an execution plan, we’re usually trying to work out the mechanical steps that Oracle took to produce... 09 July 2014 10 min read
Grant Fritchey Why Put Your Database into Source Control? Checking program code into source control is a daily ritual for most developers, but versioning database code is less well-understood.... 08 July 2014 7 min read
Melanie Townsend Avoiding Database Deployment Disasters – 7 Tips Here are seven practical tips for any 'accidental DBA' or developer, faced with having to deploy an upgrade to a... 02 July 2014 7 min read
Saurabh Dhoble Developing a Custom SSIS Source Component SSIS was designed to be extensible. Although you can create tasks that will take data from a wide variety of... 30 June 2014 21 min read
David Njoku Oracle for Absolute Beginners: Part 8 – Database Design and Normalization A wise man once said, I know one thing: that I know nothing. If you’ve followed this series from the... 27 June 2014 7 min read
Grant Fritchey Rollback and Recovery Troubleshooting; Challenges and Strategies What happens if your database deployment goes awry? Do you restore from a backup or snapshot and lose all the... 26 June 2014 16 min read
Joshua Feierman The Mindset of the Enterprise DBA: Creating and Applying Standards to Our Work Although many professions, such as pilots, surgeons and IT administrators, require judgement and skill, they also require the ability to... 25 June 2014 12 min read
Randolf Geist Parallel Execution Skew – Addressing Skew Using Manual Rewrites In this part of the series we will have a look at different approaches to how Parallel Execution Skew can... 23 June 2014 13 min read
Robert Sheldon SQL Server Tables – 11 Questions You Were Too Shy to Ask There are some aspects of tables in SQL Server that a lot of people get wrong, purely because they seem... 18 June 2014 35 min read
Tony Davis Database Branching and Merging Strategies Source control will allow you to maintain branches in the development of your database, but the subsequent merge isn't pain-free.... 18 June 2014 23 min read
Jonathan Hickford Using Migration Scripts in Database Deployments A SQL migration script is similar to a SQL build script, except that it changes a database from one version... 17 June 2014 20 min read
David Poole Experiments with NEO4J: Using a graph database as a SQL Server metadata hub NEO4J, the graph database, can be used to provide answers that are very tricky for relational databases, including providing diagrams... 17 June 2014 18 min read
Jonathan Lewis Execution Plans Part 6: Pushed Subqueries In part 5 of this series we examined a couple of examples where you had to handle the “first child... 16 June 2014 10 min read
David Njoku Oracle for Absolute Beginners: Part 7 – Creating Tables, Constraints and Triggers A wise man once said: start at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.... 10 June 2014 9 min read
Joe Celko The SQL of The Game of Life Joe finds a reference to Conway's Game of Life whilst clearing out his desk, and is suddenly gripped with nostalgia.... 05 June 2014 7 min read
Kalen Delaney Row Versioning Concurrency in SQL Server The optimistic concurrency model assumes that several concurrent transactions can usually complete without interfering with each other, and therefore do... 05 June 2014 44 min read
Phil Factor On Comparing Tables in SQL Server How do you compare two SQL tables? Every SQL Developer or DBA knows the answer, which is 'it depends'. It... 29 May 2014 20 min read
Jonathan Lewis Execution Plans part 5: First Child Variations I’ve offered up “first child first, recursive descent” as a basic strategy for interpreting execution plans – but it’s not... 28 May 2014 14 min read
