HuggyBear

Born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, with a brief excursion to study in Brussels, Melbourne & Washington D.C., Hugo has been working with SQL Server since 1998. He’s busied himself as a DBA since 1999 (with mcdba & mcitp certifications in ‘01 & ‘08 respectively), as independent consultant with his own company, Intellabase Solutions, since 2002 (now part time), and has held various permanent position with Transcontinental, Sun Life Canada, and now Alithya as a consultant. He enjoys writing documentation for quick, safe infrastructure rebuilds and expansions, and most challengingly, propositions to Executives Management on how to improve enterprise Security. He has spoken at SQLteach/DevTeach, Montreal Dot Net User Group, SQLGulf, Vermont User Groups over 5 times, has a blog on SQLServerCentral, and has been recognised as a SQL Server MVP in 2010.
Recently has adapted thanks to certification and experience the Data Engineering age, meanwhile studying the latest improved scripting language, Python.
  • Interests: Lately (2019): windfoiling or windsurfing with a Skroka foil....amongst many other supposedly 'extreme' sports, but which are really just the norm for people raised in Lotusland aka Vancouver, BC, lower-mainland region, Sea-to-Sky country as we know it.
  • Blog: http://dbhive.blogspot.com/
  • Jobs: SQL DBA, Data Engineer, Migrator, Clusterer, Security Implementor

All authors

Technical Article

Querying the Procedural Cache on Canada Day (July 1st)

The goal of this post is to understand the procedure cache and execution plans to ensure we use fewer resources and that queries run better. Better means higher throughput, more concurrency and fewer resources – as described by MVP Joe Webb during SQLTeach in Vancouver just last month.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2009-07-08

1,134 reads

Technical Article

Configuring Auto-Retry on SQL Server Agent

The goal of this post is to explain how to take advantage of Auto-Retry and why you will want to use it. I hope to clarify in which circumstances an auto-retry works best and when not to use it also. The (disclaimer!) point is that every job has its own constraints, requirements, and has to be evaluated individually for whether an auto-retry will work. I will try and keep this summary short and crisp, but still with enough detail to understand auto retry best.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2009-06-01

3,877 reads

All authors

Blogs

T-SQL Tuesday #203: Risk and Reward

By

This is timely, as I’m currently on a boat in the Adriatic taking a...

dataMinds Connect 2026 – Slides & Scripts

By

You can find the slides and SQL scripts for my session “Spice up your...

How to Clear the SSMS Cache (SSMS 21 and Later)

By

How to Clear the SSMS Cache (SSMS 21 and Later) Updated...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Using CHOOSE()

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Using CHOOSE()

Re-Seeding a Broken Log Shipping Secondary (Without Touching the Primary)

By LukaMK

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Re-Seeding a Broken Log Shipping...

The DBA is Dead! Long Live the !

By Grant Fritchey

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The DBA is Dead! Long...

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

Using CHOOSE()

We have this code that sets some status values and then queries them using the CHOOSE() function in SQL Server 2025. 

CREATE TABLE Status
(
    StatusID INT,
    StatusDescription VARCHAR(20)
);
GO
INSERT dbo.Status
(
    StatusID,
    StatusDescription
)
VALUES
(0, 'Uncategorized'),
(1, 'Active'),
(2, 'Inactive'),
(3, 'Temp');

GO
SELECT CHOOSE(StatusID, 'Unknown', 'Active', 'Inactive', 'Temporary')
FROM Status;
When the SELECT runs, what is returned?

See possible answers