Dear Users,

We, the tech people, understand that you just want technology to work so you can get your jobs done.  We really, really understand that.  When your technology doesn’t work, you turn to us so we’ll make it behave. We like making technology behave – we got into this… Read more

Sean’s latest rant – about a vendor with a dangerously small amount of SQL knowledge – has spurred me to talk about a common theme I’ve been seeing lately: Proving facts to ignoramuses*.

How to Prove Facts to the Unbeliever

1. State the fact.
2. Explain the fact.
3. Restate the fact.…

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Friday

6am – up to catch an 8:30 flight. My daughter Lisette is going with me on this trip.

9:30am local time, we arrive in CO. Grab a car and head north to Fort Collins for Beau Jo’s pizza, free loaner bikes from the Bicycle Library, and general sightseeing. BEAUTIFUL… Read more

Matthew Velic (blog, Twitter) just asked this question on Twitter:

And really that’s a question I’d ask anyone on the “speaker’s circuit” – where’s the easy place to break in?

Wow, Matt…in the words of the great Ricky… Read more

I got some excellent questions from my 24HOP session yesterday, and when presenting the same session at NTSSUG last night.  There were a few questions pointing to the same area:

 * How is the ON clause evaluated before the JOIN clause?

 * If ON is evaluated before the JOIN, how…

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It’s only twelve  eight days until SQL Saturday #52 in Colorado! I’ll be presenting Code Sins and my new T-SQL Brush-up.  Check out the schedule…you have sessions from such awesome and familiar names as Chris Shaw, Drew Minkin, Glenn… Read more

Yesterday, I told our Groupies: I feel give-y today. Is there anything you’d like me to promote for you?  Wendy Pastrick (Twitter) of WIT fame replied, “Today I tweeted a link for an award given out to High School aged girls who are interested in computing. That… Read more

I’m still old school in many ways. And they’re not the ways that let you get away with wearing wayfarers, or shouting “get off my lawn, you kids!”

In this case, I’m still havin a hard time weaning myself off the old system table “syscomments”. I LOVE syscomments…I can find… Read more

Content rating: Beginner    

This blog was originally posted on December 17, 2009. I’ve pulled it out of the closet for T-SQL Tuesday #10, with apologies for being too gosh-darn busy to write something new. 

This is a companion blog to “Get Index Included Column Info“. 

What are…

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Let’s say that you have a staging table, that then loads to a destination table in the same database.  If you have more than one person working on the process, data types can quickly get out of whack.

So: what’s the easiest way to compare datatypes bewteen two “matching” tables?… Read more

It’s only twelve days until SQL Saturday #52 in Colorado! I’ll be presenting Code Sins and my new T-SQL Brush-up.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

• Register for the event at www.SQLSaturday.com.
• Tweet and/or blog about having…

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As we’ve seen in recent DBARant-able tales, not everyone is completely familiar with methods of restoring SQL backup files to new filepaths. The answer, in short, is: RESTORE FILELISTONLY/ RESTORE WITH MOVE.

Let’s say that you backed up the database ImportantDB from your production server, and you want… Read more