Disaster in the Real World - Hurricane

Hurricane Charlie had a pretty substantial impact on residents and businesses in Central Florida. Andy lives in the Orlando area and wrote up some notes on the various challenges he ran into it. Out of it you might find a couple things worth thinking about adding into your DR plan.

Using DMO to Enable and Disable Triggers

This short article shows you how to use SQL-DMO to enable or disable all the triggers in a database.

Think like a DBA

What do your programmers do with nulls? Do they know nullif, isnull, what about the powerful coalesce function? Do they think DBA's look at the world differently? Why, it's all code isn't it?

The Bowling Challenge

Know anything about bowling? Or writing hard core TSQL? Or test driven development? Even if you don't, this might be a good way to build those skills. Write a stored procedure that can score a bowling game and you might win one of our books and a shirt!

Is all code really code? One question from an interview

Andy discusses one of the questions he uses to screen senior developer candidates. While the question itself is interesting, we think it will be more interesting to see how many of you agree with one of his positions - that developers think of program code and sql code as different animals, especially when it comes to debugging.

Case Sensitivity in Selects - Part 2

In this follow up Andy looks into some of the options available when you're dealing with situations where you're joining a case sensitive column to a case insensitive column. We think after reading this you'll be ready to just say no!

Case Sensitivity in Selects - Part 3

See what a reader had to say about Part 1, make sure you've read Part 2, then feel the pain as the author describes a lookup table that should have had unique values and doesn't.

You have recently hired a new DBA who...

You need to backup a database at the...

Mini Disaster - AC Failure

Are you prepared to handle a full or partial failure of your AC system? Ever thought about what would happen if it did happen. Once again Andy offers comments on a real world incident. While we'd all like to think it will never happen to us, we think sharing these incidents is a great way to prevent it from happening to others.