The way variable scoping works in SQL Server has been well documented on MSDN, but I have seen related issues come up on forums recently so I decided to go over it.  Generally, a variable in T-SQL is available between when it has been declared and the end of… Read more

Purpose and introduction

A Python program will not be able to take advantage of more than one core or more than one CPU by default.  One way to get the program to take advantage of multiple cores is through the multiprocessing module.  There are lots of excellent references and tutorials… Read more

Intro

Recently, I came over Cython and started experimenting with it.  After some basic testing, I found several things of interest.

1. Used properly, Cython is a fantastic way to speed up Python code.
2. It is extremely liberal in what Python code it will accept, but works best when the code…

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The differences and interactions between class variables and instance variables are well described in the Python 2.x documentation, but they can be slightly subtle in some cases and I recently spent quite some time troubleshooting an issue even though I should have known better.

To put it simply, class… Read more

Not long ago I wrote about how to write well about SQL Server, and one major point was that jargon should be used sparingly and carefully.  Tied to that, I thought it might be beneficial to collect ten of the more commonly used jargon phrases in the world of… Read more

I.                    Introduction

A little while ago, my wonderful wife Renee got a Solid State Drive (SSD) for me.  Being a DBA, one of my first thoughts was to wonder what kind of effect this would have on database performance, since I use my home computer for a lot of testing… Read more

My article Plotting SQL Server Data for Data Visualization is up on MSSQLTips now and discusses using PyQt and Matplotlib to plot data from SQL Server.

My article Single User Performance of SQLite v SQL Server was posted yesterday on SQLServerCentral.  This one does a comparison of the performance of… Read more

1. I.              Introduction

I recently submitted my entry for a writing competition as part of my continuing education.  While I was preparing for the contest, in which we had one week to create the best entry we could on a topic they provided, I starting doing considerable research on the topic… Read more