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

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

It’s T-SQL Tuesday time, and this one is a bit of a challenge for me. Rob Farley is hosting, and asking for people to write on Plan Operators, those various elements that go into the execution plans in T-SQL. I don’t dive too deeply into these items, unlike… Read more

The CHOOSE command is new in the T-SQL as of SQL Server 2012. I hadn’t ever had the chance to work with it, but after seeing someone submit a piece recently, I decided to play with it a bit.

This feature is essentially an indexing value from an array. Here’s… Read more

About 3 or 4 years ago I was talking with my wife and a colleague of hers that worked in the mobile industry. This person and my wife thought that the mobile industry would explode, and it’s impact and expansion would dwarf the PC revolution that had most of our… Read more

After creating my Azure account, I wasn’t sure where to go next. Fortunately I had an immediate project that occupied my attention: a public Adventureworks database.

As we noted, Red Gate and SQLServerCentral agreed to host the database and cover costs. Once Jamie Thomson transferred the database to my subscription,… Read more

Once again, Red Gate is planning on a tour of the US for the SQL in the City events. Last year we had a large tour, hitting 6 cities in the US during October and November of 2012. It was great fun, and very well received by the attendees.… Read more

It’s amazing how software has advanced. I look at the software I use, and I’m amazed. I still remember texting to 40404 for basic twitter usage on my Windows 6.5 Mobile. That seems miles away from the apps I know use on my current iPhone 4S. I almost can’t comprehend… Read more

I’ve been meaning to do this, and I finally had the chance recently to start working with Azure. Red Gate is investing in cloud tools, and more development tools, so it’s something I need to work on.

I went to the Azure page, and noticed a “Member Offers” link.

When… Read more

When Andy Warren (b | t | Li)started SQL Saturday with #1 in Orlando, we weren’t sure it would succeed. After a few events, we dreamed and wondered if we’d ever get to 50 events. Despite our success in the past, we weren’t sure if a free event,… Read more

I ran across someone that was building a restore script to automated their restores. This person wanted their script to work with any instance, and that means they’d need to find the path for the database files, if the database already existed.

It was interesting to me, and I decided… Read more

I know it’s not schizophrenic, but that sounds better. It’s really a split personality.

I wrote recently about Windows 8 and what I consider to be poor design in the update system. Today I want to look at another aspect that troubles me.

Programs

I’ve gotten used to the… Read more

Someone suggested Newsblur to me, and I went to their home page. Like many sites, it asks you to sign up, so I decided to give it a try.

The import from Google Reader caught my attention, so I clicked it. It asked for an authorization from Google, and then… Read more

It’s T-SQL Tuesday time, this month hosted by Wendy Pastrick who asks you to talk about the Long and Winding Road. Wendy asks us to talk about your job, your road map to the future, and what might be in store for you.

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog… Read more

I’ve been using Windows 8 almost exclusively for about 3 weeks. I got a new desktop a couple months back, which has only had Windows 8 installed on it. My new laptop arrived about 4 weeks ago and a week later I finally abandoned my Macbook Air and moved fulltime… Read more

One of the tools that Red Gate Software makes is SQL Source Control. It’s a plug in to SSMS that allows you to hook your database up to version control. I’ve used it a few times in the past in conjunction with Subversion to demo the product. However I hadn’t… Read more

One of my authors sent me this note:

“

I know you only know me as a writer for SQLServerCentral, but I have a friend whose son is really bad. He is at the hospital and the cannot pay it. It is very expensive. The family is desesperate. They live… Read more

I’ve written on how to enable Filestream and how to add a filegroup, but I haven’t touched the Filestream impact on your tables. This post will look at the table side of Filestream and how you get your binary data into the database.

Let’s assume you have a filestream… Read more

Yes, it does. However, let’s prove it. First let’s create a database, a table, and enter some data:

-- create a database
CREATE DATABASE TDE_Primer
;
GO
-- create and populate a table
USE TDE_Primer
go
CREATE TABLE MyTable
( myid INT
, myname VARCHAR(20)
, mychar VARCHAR(200)…

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I wish this were the mantra of all people, but certainly those in technology:

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