Here are the presentation materials for today’s Pragmatic Works Training on the T’s session A Functions Is A Function – Comparison of the Performance Impacts of User Defined Functions.

Download: A Function By Any Other Name Is A Function

Other resources:

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The INSERT command has two distinct ways to load data into a table.

INSERT INTO Table (field1, field2) VALUES ('string1','string2')

And

INSERT INTO Table (field1, field2)
SELECT field1, field2 FROM Table2

Both of these are very handy and have been around as far back as I can remember. Historically you… Read more

Welcome to Day 28 of my “A Month of PowerShell” series – the last day. This series will use the series landing page on this blog at http://blog.waynesheffield.com/wayne/a-month-of-powershell/. Please refer to this page to see all of the posts in this series, and to quickly go to them.

During… Read more

Since I started regularly attending SQL Saturday events some five years ago, I’ve sat in on a number of professional development sessions by Andy Warren, Buck Woody, Don Gabor, and others.  Each one offered different bits of advice based on his or her own experience, but there… Read more

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In SQL Server Reporting Services, when adding a new dataset to a report, you may see an error that looks like this:

"An item with the same key has already been added."




















Based on some quick googling, it looks like there are several potential causes for the error, but here's…

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If you get some time, head on out to IT Central Station.com. You can provide some valuable feedback on the technology products you have had experiences with. I just found out about the site a couple of weeks ago, and am enjoying posting reviews on the products that I… Read more

Thanks to everyone who attended my session “Data Warehouse Architecture” to the PASS DBA virtual chapter.  There were over 200 attendees!  The recording of the session is available here.

Here is the PowerPoint presentation: Building an Effective Data Warehouse Architecture

Data Warehouse Architecture

You’re a DBA and your… Read more

Why bother encrypting?

As a SQL Server DBA I am primarily responsible for making sure my client’s data is protected and available amongst other things. In many cases I have gone to clients and projects to find that sensitive data is not… Read more

Unusually, Sean and I will be guests on someone else’s podcast this week! Tune in live to our PowerScripting podcast Thursday Feb 28, 2013 at 9:30PM EST here. You know, if you want to.

Onward!

-Jen McCown
http://www.MidnightDBA.com/Jen

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Attaching an MDF file without an LDF file can be a little tricky. I had to go through this recently when I downloaded the AdventureWorks2008R2 database, which was just an MDF file. I know I’ve done this before, but I had to stop and look things up, which means… Read more

I earned my nickname. I’m proud of it. I am the Scary DBA. I don’t really like to advertise my other nickname, Rant (get it, Grant shortened to another word). I earned that one too. I’m not proud of it at all. I got that one because I sometimes don’t… Read more

Old Dog, New Tricks

I’ve been writing tools for SQL Server for a lot of years. Some of these tools were never completely released. Some of them were just for me. Some of them overlapped other tools already on the market and free for all. Recently, I started updating my… Read more

Welcome to Day 27 of my “A Month of PowerShell” series. This series will use the series landing page on this blog at http://blog.waynesheffield.com/wayne/a-month-of-powershell/. Please refer to this page to see all of the posts in this series, and to quickly go to them.

One of the tasks that… Read more

Note: This solution is not necessarily the best or most efficient solution in all cases.  It is, however, very simple and works with any site - even ones you have no control over.

Problem:

Internal Web System XYZ must be accessed via an ugly URL such as http://randomservername.internalexample.com:8675309/SomeCrazyPath/SomeFile.htm

Desired End… Read more

To all of the wonderful attendees to both the VMware Partner Exchange SQL Server on VMware VBCA boot camp on Sunday and the guys who braved the nasty weather for the Fort Wayne SQL Server Users Group presentation tonight, I say thank you. All of your questions were great… Read more

Today I had to write a little function that takes the long had version of a fraction, say 8 3/4 and convert it a proper number (float) and then convert that number from inches to centimeters. While that is handy, I thought it would be best to include a few… Read more

Would you love to get a weekly status report of all the databases hosted on your mission critical servers? ,Would you love to get a report which will help you maintain and manage your large shared SQLServer environments neat and clean?

If your answer is Yes, then powershell is your… Read more

Now that you have created a Share Data Source, it’s time to add some data to your project. In this post I will explain Shared Datasets and demonstrate how to add a one to your project.

As with a data source, you can create an embedded or shared dataset. The… Read more

Welcome to Day 26 of my “A Month of PowerShell” series. This series will use the series landing page on this blog at http://blog.waynesheffield.com/wayne/a-month-of-powershell/. Please refer to this page to see all of the posts in this series, and to quickly go to them.

If you utilize the sa… Read more