I am no different to many others where I am being asked to work on various projects concurrently and expected to work through a long list of technical debt that needs addressing with our SQL databases. Throw in the usual day to day production issues as well and you get… Read more

When I started blogging last year, my first major decision was either to host my own site somewhere using a CMS type system or use an online blogging service like blogger for example. Ultimately, because I wanted to have quite fine grained control over my blogs and also the space… Read more

SQLBits9 – “Query across the Mersey” was held in the majestic Adelphi hotel. This was my first SQLBits experience and was fortunate enough to be able to attend all three days. I was not disappointed! Walking through the main door and up the stairs into the main conference hall, I… Read more

Is all set to be officially known as SQL 2012 and will be finally released in....... 2012!

Announced at the PASS Summit 2011, it is due to be released to manufactoring in the first half of next year.

The other major announcement from PASS was Microsoft actively supporting the Hadoop… Read more

I came across this really simple best practice from BOL for the xml method exist which when used will give you a much cleaner and faster query plan. If like me you commonly use the name of an element or attribute as part of an XQuery predicate, then you would… Read more

I know that this subject has been blogged about numerous times but I thought I'd post an alternative way of shredding a comma separated string to a table that I come up with today, albeit with help from the very clever Itzik Ban-Gan cross join nested CTE that many of… Read more

This is the last part of a 3 part blog which will attempt to show some different ways of how you can use the xml modify() method to update the contents of an XML document. This part, starting at the absolute basics, will cover the ability to delete data in… Read more

This is the second part of a 3 part blog which will attempt to show some different ways of how you can use the xml modify() method to update the contents of an XML document. This part, starting at the absolute basics, will cover the ability to update data in… Read more

This is the first part of a 3 part blog which will attempt to show some different ways of how you can use the xml modify() method to update the contents of an XML document. This first part, starting at the absolute basics, will cover the ability to insert data… Read more

This is a revised post of an original article that I first published in December. Even though I thought that I was very meticulous in my research, something was pointed out to me that I was totally unaware of - Unicode character expansions. So apologies to the community with regard… Read more

You can only use the position() function within an xquery predicate and can't use it to return the position value of the node itself, which is a shame, but a couple of good workarounds have been published. However I had a requirement (don't ask why!) to return the position()… Read more

I've used SQL to generate countless blobs of xml over the years and one feature that I have come to rely heavily upon is the ability to easily build complex xml structures by using column aliases in conjunction with the FOR XML PATH clause in your query. Not only do… Read more

Database users can become orphaned for a few reasons. For example, a database restore to another instance or deleting the corresponding SQL login would have the effect of leaving a database user orphaned. Development/testing SQL servers may also experience this due to the number of ad-hoc updates that may occur… Read more

I know that this subject has been blogged about numerous times but I thought I'd post an alternative way of shredding a comma separated string to a table that I come up with today, albeit with help from the very clever Itzik Ban-Gan cross join nested CTE that many of… Read more

Database users can become orphaned for a few reasons. For example, a database restore to another instance or deleting the corresponding SQL login would have the effect of leaving a database user orphaned. Development/testing SQL servers may also experience this due to the number of ad-hoc updates that may occur… Read more

I came across this really simple best practice from BOL for the xml method exist which when used will give you a much cleaner and faster query plan. If like me you commonly use the name of an element or attribute as part of an XQuery predicate, then you would… Read more

Is all set to be officially known as SQL 2012 and will be finally released in....... 2012!

Announced at the PASS Summit 2011, it is due to be released to manufactoring in the first half of next year.

The other major announcement from PASS was Microsoft actively supporting the Hadoop… Read more

SQLBits9 – “Query across the Mersey” was held in the majestic Adelphi hotel. This was my first SQLBits experience and was fortunate enough to be able to attend all three days. I was not disappointed! Walking through the main door and up the stairs into the main conference hall, I… Read more