After having too many people ask me what NebraSQL meant (its a play on words - Nebraska+SQL - get it?)  I have decided to give up on that attempt at being clever and just go to "Nebraska SQL from @DBA_ANDY" 

I have also updated the URL to nebraskasql.blogspot.com - the…

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This is a old and simple one, but an important subtlety that TSQL developers must be aware of.

Using the BETWEEN syntax is easy enough in a WHERE clause, and it's pretty obvious for numbers.

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I’ve been aware of this clause in TSQL for a long time, but I’ve never really used it. Mainly because I’ve rarely had the need to use windowing functions because I primarily work with XML and relational data that doesn’t need to be aggregated that often or have ranking applied… Read more

How to create and setup a SQL clustering on your Desktop or Laptop

 

I thought to write this post after I discussed in a forum. SQL clustering is a bit complicated one. I mean most of the DBAs are not configured or tested it, because we don’t get… Read more

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I’ve always found clusters a pain in the neck.  For my latest pain I just spent the last 2 days debugging DBMail on an instance on a cluster.  To the best of my ability everything appeared set up correctly but when I tried a test email it wouldn’t send.  The… Read more

I recently completed a series of blog posts on www.lessthandot.com on T-SQL Window functions.  The enhancements to SQL Server 2012 in this area are phenomenal.  They solve a myriad of issues including calculating running totals with SQL.  Check it out if you want to learn more and get some simple…

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On the fourth Wednesday of each month, the Women in Technology Virtual Chapter of PASS has its monthly conference call to discuss and plan upcoming WIT activities, be it SQL Saturday WIT panels or the WIT luncheon at the annual PASS Summit.  To help promote women in technology, I’m declaring… Read more

Once again it is time for the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) Board of Directors election. This year there are three seats available and five candidates vying for those seats. You can begin the process of learning about the candidates here:

PASS Elections Site

If you want to interact with… Read more

I bet most of us don’t think about installing software that we need/want to try. We’re either running as local admin or we can elevate to local admin as needed. It’s nice to be able to install a piece of freeware or open source that will elegantly solve a problem.… Read more

I will be speaking with several of my House of Brick Technologies colleagues at SQL Saturday #165 in Lincoln in a couple weeks (October 6th):


I am giving my solo presentation on the Ola Hallengren Maintenance Solution and also co-presenting "Virtualizing Business Critical SQL Servers" with our SQL…

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I run into an interesting issue with an Availability Group database recently. I was running a data load against a database in an Always On Availability group database in SQL Server 2012.  The load was SSIS package migrating data from staging database when the package fell over with the following… Read more

Question : Today morning, I received a call from one of my old friend, with an query for SQL Server. He is sharing a problem with Sp_Helptext. He is considering it as a Bug.

Try to rename any procedure in your database by right click. Then modify it. SSMS will… Read more

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Last week during my 24 Hours of PASS session on Choosing a Reporting Platform I fielded a question that appeared multiple times during the Q&A so I thought it would be worth post.

When using Power View in Excel 2013 the first thing you may notice is a screen like… Read more

The date has been set for the next North American PowerShell Summit.  It will be held Monday April 22nd – Wednesday April 24th at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington.  I’m already secured my spot and if you want to be there you better act fast!  As of… Read more

An interesting idea. I saw this question asked after I was playing with table types a bit. “Can you move a table type between schemas?”

Suppose I had two schemas:

CREATE SCHEMA OldSchema
;
GO
CREATE SCHEMA NewSchema
;
GO

In one of them, I create a table type and… Read more

A couple of days ago I read Steve Jones’ blog on creating a user defined table type.  This reminded me that I had just recently been reading about TVPs (Table Valued Parameters) which require user defined table types.  Steve wondered about how useful the concept of user defined table… Read more

Here are some of my favorite Master Data Services (MDS) resources:

SQL Server Master Data Services Utilities: A set of useful add-ons for SQL Server Master Data Services, including utilities for generating an MDS model, loading the model, writing a custom UI for model data and integrating the model… Read more

So, No SQL Saturday in Austin This Year.

I know a lot of folks were disappointed that we (POSSE) weren’t able to pull together in time for a SQL Saturday in Austin this year. We are shooting for a spring date and I’ll be posting more about that in the… Read more