Hierarchies are one of the long awaited features that will now be available in the latest version of PowerPivot. Hierarchies are useful because it allows a single click for a user to bring in all the fields that exist in a natural table hierarchy.  Normally the user would have to… Read more

I presented two sessions this weekend in Birmingham AL at SQL Saturday 81.  I was in the first slot of the day with my “You Inherited a Database, Now What” session.  The room was pretty full so I was excited.  I had a great group that was very interactive.

My… Read more

T-SQL cursors are generally bad approach and are often misused. In today’s world of correlated subqueries, CTE’s, recursive CTE’s, ranking and windowing functions (ROW_NUMBER, RANK, DENSE_RANK, NTILE) and other tools, you have really few moments where cursor is better solution. On the other hand, there are still scenarios where cursor… Read more

Introduction

This is the final post to discuss the last Lookup function Multilookup(). The other two – Lookup() and LookupSet() have already been discussed in my previous posts.

Syntax

Multilookup(source_expression, destination_expression, result_expression, dataset)

source_expression – The field which will act as the key/lookup value for the destination. This will be…

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SQL Saturday #85 is quickly approaching. It will be held in sunny Orlando, FL so if you live in the area get ready for awesome because I am coming to town! Ok, that may have been a little over the top but all parts of that thought are in fact… Read more

I was studying SQL Azure parameters some time ago and found out that there are no materials which tell you clearly what it is, what it costs, what are limitations, what developers can and can’t do etc. There are so many marketing materials, business materials and even very technical materials… Read more

Today was an exciting day, since I discovered that fellow SQL Server MVP Brent Ozar (Blog|Twitter) had posted a very nice review of my book SQL Server Hardware.

That means a lot to me, since I respect Brent, both as a person and as a… Read more

Here is a tip that could make you much more productive:  At home, I have a desktop computer with dual-monitors (via a HDMI connection and a DVI connection with 1920×1080 resolution.  One monitor is 24-inch, the other 21-inch).  I also have a laptop that I travel with and on that… Read more

What had me reflecting on numbers was an article in the Financial Times (Conduit of Contention if you can find it) that talked about the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, which settles all the equity trades on American exchanges. According to the article the DTC settled 1.48 quadrillion dollars… Read more

This has been a great week for me.  I had a lot of new faces come out for the Columbus GA SQL Users Group meeting Tuesday night as well as being notified that I have been made a PASS Regional Mentor for South Central US. Mark Ginnebaugh sent out the… Read more

A little over a year ago Patrick LeBlanc wrote a blog post about inserting an unknown row into a dimension.  This is a great script and i've used it dozens of time, but this week I made a few modifications to it that I thought I would share.

First… Read more

It’s time for the Un-SQL Friday #005 roundup!

From managers…

First up, The Lone DBA admits that he wasn’t always (ahem) one of us…he’s got some excellent advice from the hiring manager’s point of view.   I particularly liked this:

When asked what your biggest weaknesses are, it’s a good…

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As I mentioned in the introductory post, I’m summarizing posts from previous years in the the past week.  Some posts of interest that you may want to check out are:

• Management Data Warehouse Whitepaper (7/22/2009) – White paper from a couple years back that discusses the management data warehouse.

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Written by David Postlethwaite

I’m sure there are many out there using System Centre Operations Manager (or SCOM for short) it’s a great tool for monitoring the Windows estate.

One area where it is lacking is updating the subscribers list for a Notification Group – in other words changing the…

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When administering Merge Replication, sometimes we need to mark foreign key constraints NOT FOR REPLICATION.  In some cases, we might require replication agent activity to be treated differently from user activity since we cannot guarantee the order of changes that are replicated.  To be more specific, sometimes parent and child… Read more

A new feature has been added to SQL Saturday.  Now when you register for an event you can build your schedule on the website.  I used it tonight to build my schedule for SQL Saturday 81.  This will be a huge help for attendees in preparing for their big… Read more

Today I came across a link to a neat little script for SQL 2005 / 2008 to help derive the head blocker in a blocking chain.  That script can be found here.  I was looking at the script and thought it looked pretty cool and also wondered why it… Read more

Keeping your SQL objects’ naming rules during furious development is hard. New levels of information are added continuously, entities are being splitted, then joined together again, entities are often renamed several times just because you have better name for them etc. For me, renaming is heart of T-SQL refactoring. But… Read more

I recently had the need to move the MSDTC for a cluster to a new SAN drive.  It’s a quite simple thing to do, but you can’t redirect the MSDTC resource to a new drive.  Let’s just walk through the basic steps.

The first thing you need to do is… Read more

I saw this question come across Twitter under the #sqlhelp tag one day and was wondering myself. Someone suggested the default trace, I was thinking msdb.dbo.restorehistory and decided to check.

First I hit Books Online. It notes that the restore_date column means: Date and time of the restore operation. Can… Read more