Alex Kozak The Puzzle of ‘Rating Decomposition’ When reading rating information, how do you you knew how many points each separate voter gave if you only know... 29 August 2007 18 min read
Alex Kuznetsov and Alex Styler Close those Loopholes – Testing Stored Procedures Alex and Alex continue their series of articles on 'Unit Testing' database development work with some examples of unit testing... 20 August 2007 9 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Close These Loopholes in Your Database Testing Alex starts of a series of articles on 'Unit Testing' your database development work. He starts off by describing five... 31 July 2007 7 min read
Remi Gregoire RBAR: ‘Row By Agonizing Row’ Remi Gregoire describes the vice of RBAR Database Programming, 'Row By Agonising Row', and illustrates how the effect of RBAR... 26 July 2007 15 min read
Phil Factor Robyn Page Crosstab Pivot-table Workbench Robyn and Phil turn their attention to the bedrock of management reporting, the Pivot Table. Under Phil's 'wild man' influence,... 22 July 2007 16 min read
Rodney Landrum Temporarily Changing an Unknown Password of the sa Account You are asked for the sa password for a SQL Server in order to perform a software upgrade. You, the... 10 July 2007 12 min read
Phil Factor Robyn Page RSS Newsfeed Workbench Robyn and Phil decide to build an RSS newsfeed in TSQL, using the power of SQL Server's XML. … 06 July 2007 12 min read
Phil Factor Robyn Page XML Jumpstart Workbench In which Robyn and Phil decide that the best way of starting to learn XML is to jump in and... 27 June 2007 9 min read
Adam Machanic A Primer on Managing Data Bitemporally In systems that require, for auditing purposes, advanced logging and reproducibility of reports between runs, a straightforward update, insert, or... 10 May 2007 8 min read
Phil Factor Robyn Page SQL Server Grouping Workbench A gentle lesson about GROUP BY on the Nursery Slopes develops gradually into a wild ride off-piste amongst the pine-trees.… 26 April 2007 17 min read
Eric Brown Troubleshooting with Dynamic Management Views If you work with SQL Server 2000, then you know how painful it is to triage a server that has... 12 April 2007 5 min read
Phil Factor Reading and Writing Files in SQL Server using T-SQL SQL Server provides several "standard" techniques by which to read and write to files but, just occasionally, they aren't quite... 10 April 2007 10 min read
Keith Fletcher Creating Cross Tab Queries and Pivot Tables in SQL For those times when you absolutely, positively got to perform a cross tab query in SQL, Keith Fletcher's T-SQL stored... 27 March 2007 18 min read
Pop Rivett Pop Rivett and the Case of the Rogue SPIDs A process in a complex database occasionally, and apparently randomly, manages to put table locks on vital tables. Several applications... 22 March 2007 6 min read
Phil Factor Robyn Page The Helper Table Workbench Cursors and iterations are both renowned for slowing down Transact SQL code, but sometimes seem unavoidable. In this workbench, Robyn... 16 March 2007 16 min read
Phil Factor Writing to Word from SQL Server Never a man to walk away from a challenge, Phil Factor set himself the task of automating the production of... 06 March 2007 7 min read
Phil Factor Robyn Page SQL Server Security Workbench Part 1 Robyn Page and Phil Factor present practical T-SQL techniques for controlling access to sensitive information within the database, and preventing... 06 March 2007 17 min read
Grant Fritchey SQL Server Error Handling Workbench Grant Fritchey steps into the workbench arena, with an example-fuelled examination of catching and gracefully handling errors in SQL 2000... 20 February 2007 15 min read
Phil Factor Robyn Page SQL Server Excel Workbench The need to produce Excel reports from SQL Server is very common. Here, Robyn Page and Phil Factor present practical... 06 February 2007 15 min read
Eric Brown Encryption without the Confusion Eric Brown demonstrates some practical encryption techniques in SQL Server 2005, to protect both your objects and your data.… 29 November 2006 14 min read