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It is that time again. PASS has opened the Call for Speakers. I have submitted for the past 10 years, and have been selected the past 7 years. This was such an important milestone in my career to be selected and then to present. Making sure I know what… Read more

Do you ever find yourself working on a query and realize that you need just a bit more real estate in the SSMS window? Or perhaps you find that all the toolbars, menus, etc. are cluttering things up? To solve these issues, you can toggle the full screen mode in… Read more

I love when I get the opportunity to present at SQLSaturday events. Even more than that, I love when I get the opportunity to do a precon at a SQLSaturday event. Well, I’ve got three coming up.

All three are an all day session entitled “SQL Server Tools for Query… Read more

If you are a Sr DBA or developer you have probably had some variation of this conversation at multiple points in your career (if not quite daily).

There’s a bug in my code,
Dear Liza, dear Liza,
There’s a bug in my code,
Dear Liza, a bug.

So fix it, Read more

You can watch on YouTube now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qyMutBkZsg

If you want slides and notifications, register on the Redgate hub.

We’re recording the sessions and they’ll be available whenever you have time to watch, but join us today. We’re live.

The keynote is done, with more sessions to come today.

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When working with partitioning the SWITCH operation has to be my favourite. The ability to move a large amount of data from one table to another as a META DATA ONLY operation is absolutely fantastic.

What’s also cool is that we can switch data into a non-partitioned table. Makes life… Read more

Last week I spoke about a world wary data type for storing dates and times in a single column, with a granularity of three milliseconds, DATETIME. But let’s say you don’t need that kind of accuracy and are happy with a granularity to the nearest minute. Maybe you’re storing time… Read more

I’ve been doing that thing called DevOPs for about 17 years – you know – before it had a name…

In fact it was when I first joined Jade Software that I realised that Ops and DEV had a common interest in making systems go. In 2002 I started working… Read more

SQL Server 2017 introduces a set of useful functions like STRING_AGG(), STRING_SPLIT(), TRIM()… and many more. In this tip, I am going to discuss one of the built-in aggregate functions – “STRING_AGG()”.

The function concatenates values from rows as one value with a separator, and the main advantage is it… Read more

I tend to work in the US English world. I’m somewhat embarrassed to note that I really only know one language and most of my work has been with US centric industries. I’ve rarely had the need to deal with Unicode and most of my databases have used varchar() everywhere.… Read more

I was surprised to find out that a lot people hadn’t heard about the new join type, Adaptive join. So, I figured I could do a quick overview.

Adaptive Join Behavior

Currently the adaptive join only works with columnstore indexes, but according to Microsoft, at some point, they will also… Read more

You need something from the database admin. Maybe it’s permissions, maybe it’s code troubleshooting, or maybe it’s  just that the database is slow. I’m going to let you in on the secret of the best method to get what you want out of your DBA. Ready? Here’s the secret… Ask… Read more

Planning to Increase Cost Threshold for Parallelism

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Productivity is hard to measure when your work has no definite structure like a typical office job. You may operate within the traditional 9-5 office job but the nature of working around databases requires flexibility; and, the focus is shifting constantly minute by minute. One moment you’re looking at something… Read more

There are times when you are writing a query while referencing another piece of information: the results of another query, a variable value, a webpage, etc…

If using two monitors you can have a query window on each as a reference, or you can resize two query window tabs so… Read more

Recently, I was working with the team and got stuck up with SQL Server Installation information. We got an urgent requirement to patch the physical box from Windows team.

As the server was not in production, so the server entry was missing. Since Windows team wanted to take action on… Read more

I frequently present at user groups, and always try to create a brand new presentation to keep things interesting.  We all know technology changes so quickly so there is no shortage of topics!  There is a list of all my presentations with slide decks.  Here are the new presentations I… Read more

I’m off today on a plane, flying to the UK for this Wednesday’s SQL in the City broadcast. This is our first event of 2018, and I’m excited. We’ll be talking GDPR and security, not the most exciting of topics, but we also have some cool new products to… Read more

Along with a lot of other people, I’ve been attempting to call people’s attentions to the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that was created two years ago and becomes effective in May of this year. The regulation defines processes and practices around the privacy and protection of personal data… Read more