Today was a rehearsal day. Actually the last 2-3 days of work have been split between rehearsing talks that I’m giving at SQL in the City this week, and handling the other daily work I need to do. With an extra load of family chores this week, I’ve had some… Read more

Inventory is a vital information,whether you’re a consultant or an in-house DBA, you need to have a reliable inventory of the servers you manage. This inventory can take any number of forms but, ideally, will allow some aggregation of information. When server hardware or software changes are taking place, it’s… Read more

There is nothing more annoying to me in my profession than getting calls and emails from recruiters who are looking for senior-level BI people at ridiculously low rates.  A common example: they want someone with 10-years experience in BI to work in NYC for $45/hr, no expenses paid.  Seriously?  I… Read more

Capturing information is useless unless you know how to use it. Here’s what I use to get the most out of my basic trace of anything taking over so many seconds. This is also my template for more invasive traces, and it gets tweaked on a case-by-case basis.

It’s my… Read more

Often we may need to update a column in a table based of another column in another table.

In SQL Server you can do this using UPDATE statement by joining tables together.

To understand this better let’s take a look at below contrived example.

USE [SqlAndMe]

GO

 

SELECT CustomerID Read more

To those that don’t know me “Natural Born Killers (The Series)” sounds like a very strange choice for a SQL Server blog title and to be fair it is.

Those who do know me, will know that I have been presenting a session this year titled “Natural Born Killers, performance… Read more

Microsoft has released two new Cumulative Updates for SQL Server 2008 R2. One is for SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 and the other one is for SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 2.

SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 CU13 is Build 10.50.2876, and it has five… Read more

Since I bought a Nexus 7 (two of them, I broke the first one) I’ve been interested to see if and how it would change my reading habits. I still have a preference for printed books, based mostly on a lifetime of reading a printed book a week, but also… Read more

Recently I was in a small coffee/sandwich shop for early morning coffee and while waiting watched one of the employees taking cookies from a pan and putting into paper sleeves. A bit later when I returned for a refill (and was more awake) I asked how many cookies they made… Read more

Recently I ordered a Paolini Pocket Rule from Woodpecker. It is one of a series of OneTime Tools they’ve produced over the last couple years. They come up with a design, take orders for a couple months, and then process the charge when the item ships.

Think about what it… Read more

Microsoft has been pretty clear about their commitment to the entire Azure infrastructure. The updates to Azure come out on a massively accelerated schedule. Because of this, they’re doing lots of code on lots of things that may, one day, end up in your full blown SQL Server instance, but… Read more

For those that follow me on twitter (@StrateSQL), you’ll know that throughout the day I tweet out some links of things I find interesting.  These tweets include “Reading” in the message and are items I’ve read over the past few days, usually after hours when sharing would be… Read more

To those that don’t know me “Natural Born Killers (The Series)” sounds like a very strange choice for a SQL Server blog title and to be fair it is.

Those who do know me, will know that I have been presenting a session this year titled “Natural Born Killers, performance… Read more

This week is the kickoff of the third year of SQL in the City from Red Gate. As we have the other years, we start 2013 off in London, and I’ll be leaving Wednesday on a quick trip across the water to speak. I’m looking forward to seeing lots of… Read more

To those that don’t know me “Natural Born Killers (The Series)” sounds like a very strange choice for a SQL Server blog title and to be fair it is.

Those who do know me, will know that I have been presenting a session this year titled “Natural Born Killers, performance… Read more

Sometimes we get data in some bad forms. For example look at the below table:

The names and the amounts are comma separated in two different columns. Let’s imagine we need to get this data into a table like the one below:

Notice the column names are the names that…

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Have you ever needed to order by a calculated column? You might have written it something like this:

SELECT LoginID, YEAR(HireDate) AS HireYear, 
	MONTH(HireDate) AS HireMonth
FROM HumanResources.Employee
ORDER BY YEAR(HireDate), MONTH(HireDate),
	LoginID

Did you know you don’t have to put the calculations in the ORDER BY? You don’t even… Read more

Yes, its true. Microsoft vice president has announce  that new version of sql server 2014, will release on 2014… do you think it is possible, as  not most of us not familiar with 2012 only…. any way…as MS already clear … Continue reading →

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Steve Simon will join us on Thursday June 20th at noon central to help us understand some challenges with designing a financial data warehouse in the real world. Come chat with a SQL Server MCP and seasoned data warehouse architect to reflect on his many years experience in this industry. Read more

SQL Server tracing is essential for troubleshooting performance issues, yet it can put loads on your server that would cause noticeable slowness, capture so much information that it fills the drive, and I’ve even seen it cause a cluster failover more than once.  With a tool this powerful you just… Read more