Articles

External Article

Storing and Retrieving the Initialization and Configuration Data for Applications

All developers hit the problem of how and where to store and set their configuration, profile, or initial data. A long time ago, it was generally decided that simple text files containing key/values were best, stored with the application. After all, you are relying on being able to entice busy people to get the permanent settings right for their requirements, folks who are generally not interested in your elegant computer science constructs. Not only that, but the settings must be parsed very quickly and efficiently, otherwise a process that uses the tool will slow to a crawl.

2024-10-04

External Article

Bad Data and Dirty Databases

Many years ago, my wife and I wrote an article for Datamation, a major trade publication at the time, under the title, “Don’t Warehouse Dirty Data!” It’s been referenced quite a few times over the decades but is nowhere to be found using Google these days. The point is, if you have written a report using data, you have no doubt felt the pain of dirty data and it is nothing new.

2024-09-27

Blogs

Dry-run xp_delete_file Before Actually Deleting Files?

By

Dry-run xp_delete_file Before Actually Deleting Files? xp_delete_file doesn’t really have a...

Happy Thanksgiving! (USA Holiday)

By

In the United States, today is Thanksgiving. The intent behind the holiday is to...

Getting SQL Server 2025 RTM Running in Containers on macOS

By

SQL Server 2025 RTM is here, and if you’re running Docker on macOS, you...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Cannot execute SQL cursor in Azure Query Editor (Preview)

By omkarp88

Apologies if this is posted in the wrong forum, but I am trying to...

SQl Server 2014 linked server remote server

By johnnyrmtl

Hello all, I have a linked server created on an instance which only has...

Find all the tables in a database containing particular column value

By RCRock

Hi, I want to find all the tables name under a database where tables...

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

The Ending Substring

In Azure SQL Database and SQL Server 2025, if I run this, what is returned?

SELECT '[' + SUBSTRING('Steve Jones', 7) + ']'

See possible answers