Andy Leonard (blog | twitter) and I are teaming up to do a security presentation on SSIS. It's scheduled for Wednesday, May 29th, at 11 AM EDT.

Register to attend the webinar!

We're going to look at the typical ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipeline and consider the weak points… Read more

Ever since returning from the UK for the SQLBits conference, I’ve been snowed under a mountain of action items.  I’ve got such a backlog of things to get done, emails to answer, and family to not ignore that I’m starting to feel really guilty.

So with that in mind, I… Read more

Well-designed indexes are an important part of database optimization because they are the key factor in achieving optimal query performance and response time. In the meantime, poorly designed indexes, such as missing or excessive indexes on tables, indexes placed on the wrong column or inadequate index maintenance strategies, can be… Read more

In many situations, data modification requires several steps. For example, you may need to change the values ??in two separate tables. You can use transactions to complete these two operations as a unit, or if an error occurs, does not change any of the tables. Another key consideration is that… Read more

The well-designed online analytical processing (OLAP) solution is fundamental to organizations analysis capabilities. That is why, when designing the OLAP solution for your organization, you must ensure that the components of your OLAP solution, including relational data warehouse databases and multidimensional cubes, are designed to meet the business needs of… Read more

With the release of SQL Server 2005 and later releases, Microsoft introduced set of new dynamic management view and function that helps database administrators (DBA) and developers to identify potential index candidates based on query history.

Checkout the part-3 of my three part article series on index-related dynamic management views… Read more

I’m truly honored to be chosen to speak at PASS Summit 2013. The honor is compounded as I have been chosen to deliver two sessions:

• Fast Performing SSAS Hierarchies: Tips and Tricks (3 hours)
  Track: BI Platform Architecture, Development & Administration
  Session Abstract: Depending on how they’re implemented, SQL Server…

Read more

PASS liked our “Mouth Wide Shut” interviewing session from last year so much that they’ve decided to have us back for part two: Mouth Wide Shut: Interviews from the Other Side of the Table.

This is our brand-spanking-new session for the interviewERs…those who question, vet, and rant… Read more

Seems I managed to make it through all of April without an update to the index analysis stored procedure.  It wasn’t for lack of using it with clients, but a lack of time to get the changes out the door.

A few months back, I added the option to… Read more

I am beyond excited to announce that I have been accepted to speak at the annual SQL PASS Summit 2013 in Charlotte, NC.  This will be my first time to speak at this event and I can’t wait!  The session I will be presenting is titled “How Active Directory Affects… Read more

No, this isn’t some complaint about PASS or the Summit. This is an announcement that not only will I be speaking at the PASS Summit, but I’m speaking about Azure… a lot.

First up, I’m going to be doing an all-day pre-conference seminar specifically aimed at getting you into Azure.… Read more

Snippet to quickly view computed column information. You can also view this by doing a “create table” script. This however, was a little cleaner to read and view for me.

select
	database_name = db_name()
	,object_schema_name = object_schema_name( object_id )
	,object_name = object_name( object_id )
	,full_object_name = object_schema_name( object_id ) +…

Read more

Read more

As I mentioned in the introductory post, in the Introduction to SQL Server Security session for Pragmatic Work’s Training on the T’s, I received a large number of questions that there wasn’t time to answer.  Instead of just a re-cap of all of the questions, instead I’ve opted… Read more

I’m happy to officially announce that I’ll be presenting at this year’s PASS Summit in Charlotte, NC! I’ll be presenting my talk “What is a BI DBA?” as a Spotlight Session (90 minutes). This is the second time I’ll have presented at the Summit and I’m honored and beyond excited… Read more

For sake of future generations, let’s begin to reduce typing and reuse code we’ve built. I think we can all agree that TSQL statements are often repeated. Ideally, snippets should be created to reduce repeated typing and let us focus on logic and content. However, some statements may not really… Read more

Last week I got the news that none of the four sessions I submitted for this year were accepted. Disappointing for sure, but not cause for despair. Because I’ve been lucky enough to have been accepted to speak many times in the past I don’t get too stressed out about… Read more

With the PASS Summit sessions announced, I took a quick look to see how many were what I'd consider security-centric. I know that's open to opinion, but basically, I searched on these three keywords:

• security
• secure
• compliance

I then looked at what came up. Of the accepted sessions, I only… Read more

Earlier this week I posted The many uses of CROSS APPLY and I’m quite glad I did. I’ve been working on a series of audit queries for the last couple of weeks and got thrown a bit of a curve today. The original specs included several comparisons against a date.… Read more

I’m happy to announce that I have been selected to present
at the SQL PASS Summit in Charlotte, North Carolina this October.   I’ll be delivering a session entitled “Data Cleansing in SQL Server Integration Services”, in which I’ll cover various ways to detect and cleanse dirty data using tools built… Read more