Refactoring a database object can often cause unexpected behavior in the code that accesses that object. In this article, adapted from his excellent book, Defensive Database Programming with SQL Server, Alex Kuznetsov discusses several techniques that will harden your code, so that it will not break, or behave unpredictably, as a result such changes.
2015-04-08
11,414 reads
In this tip, Daniel Farina explains an unconventional way of deleting millions of old records from a table which is accessed by a system 24x7, and without impacting that system.
2015-04-07
10,661 reads
More and more applications require the handling of geospatial data. It is easy to store spatial data, but it takes rather more thought to retrieve and manipulate it. Tasks like searching neighborhoods, and calculating distances between points is often required from databases. But how do you start? Roy and Surenda take you through the basics.
2015-04-06
9,426 reads
The Azure Active Directory Graph API enables some interesting scenarios that you can implement in your applications by enabling you to query and manipulate directory objects in Azure AD. In this article, Rick Rainey provides a clear walkthrough of its implementation.
2015-04-03
6,836 reads
Image a situation when you use the SQL Server RAND() T-SQL function as a column in a SELECT statement, and the same value is returned for every row as shown below. In this tip, Dallas Snider explains how you can get differing random values on each row.
2015-04-02
10,277 reads
With the idea of a generic Dacpac defined by international standard, comes the potential for a Visual Studio developer to use SSDT to create a generic database model to a SQL-92 compliant standard that can then be deployed to any one of the major RDBMSs. The same database model would be deployable to Oracle, MySQL, or SQL Server, for example. Professor Hugh Bin-Haad explains the reasoning and technology behind this.
2015-04-01
11,218 reads
Arshad Ali demonstrates how you can use the command line interface to tune SQL queries and how you can use SQL Server Profiler to capture the workload for tuning with Database Engine Tuning Advisor.
2015-03-31
9,734 reads
When you're developing database applications, it pays to check for index scans in the SQL Server query plan cache. Once you've identified the queries, what next? Dennes Torres gives some preliminary guidelines on how to find out why these index scans are being chosen for these queries and how to make the queries run faster and more efficiently.
2015-03-30
9,858 reads
In this article, Robin Shahan talks about security and how to control access to containers and blobs using shared access signatures (SAS) and stored access policies.
2015-03-27
7,596 reads
'Temporal' tables contain facts that are valid for a period of time. When they are used for financial information they have to be very well constrained to prevent errors getting in and causing incorrect reporting. This makes them more difficult to maintain. Is it possible to have both the stringent constraints and simple CRUD operations? Well, yes. Dwain Camps patiently explains the whole process.
2015-03-26
9,819 reads
By Steve Jones
This was Redgate in 2010, spread across the globe. First the EU/US Here’s Asia...
By John
Today is Christmas and while I do not expect anybody to actual be reading...
By Bert Wagner
Until recently, my family's 90,000+ photos have been hidden away in the depths of...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Happy Holidays, Let's Do Nerdy...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item UNISTR Escape
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Celebrating Tomorrow
In SQL Server 2025, I run this command:
SELECT UNISTR('*3041*308A*304C\3068 and good night', '*') as "A Classic";
What is returned? (assume the database has an appropriate collation)
A: 
B: 
C: 
See possible answers