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.
  • 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

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.

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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.

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2009-06-01

3,877 reads

Technical Article

Combining SQL Server & Flash Technologies - Floor Plan example

Starting the summer 2002, for about a year or so, the team and I embarked on a project to develop business for local utilities giant Hydro Quebec, by developing a web site for the twenty-first International Commission on Large Dams' congress in Montreal, where it was hosted in 2003.

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2009-03-30

2,257 reads

Technical Article

The Importance of the Segregation of Duties with Respect to Internal Controls

I diverge a little from the typical coding-based/oriented best practice to one that is focused on governance within public or government organisations with respect to the security of the data in databases used for annual reports. Internal controls fall...

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2009-02-19

1,166 reads

Technical Article

All the Aggregates you crave with Grouping Sets in SQL Server 2008

As reporting requirements increase, it seems that aggregate functionalities have thankfully risen to the occasion concurrently. To maintain its competitive edge as Staples Canada’s best vendor, BaldGorilla, where I’m currently consulting, has been able...

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2009-02-05

2,050 reads

Blogs

Learn Better: Pause to Review More

By

If you want to learn better, pause more in your learning to intentionally review.

Azure SQL Managed Instance Next-Gen: Bring on the IOPS

By

If you’ve used Azure SQL Managed Instance General Purpose, you know the drill: to...

SQL, MDX, DAX – the languages of data

By

Ramblings of a retired data architect Let me start by saying that I have...

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Forums

Two foreign keys to the same table. Can't cascade deletes.

By FunkyDexter

Not sure if this is really a relational theory question but it seems about...

Connecting Power BI to SSAS and effective user not working

By Paul Hernández

Hi everyone, Below is a consolidated summary of what we validated Architecture & data...

High Availability setup - has anyone seen this method?

By Paul Lancaster

Hi all, I recently moved to a new employer who have their HA setup...

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Question of the Day

Encoding URLs

I have this data in a SQL Server 2025 table:

CREATE TABLE Response
( ResponseID INT NOT NULL CONSTRAINT ResponsePK PRIMARY KEY
, ResponseVal VARBINARY(5000)
)
GO
If I want to get a value from this table that I can add to a URL in a browser, which of these code items produces a result I can use?

See possible answers