GOTO and T-SQL
Today we have a guest editorial from Phil Factor as Steve is on vacation. This piece looks at the complaints against GOTO and whether they are valid.
2011-12-22
869 reads
Phil Factor
- Interests: Motorbikes, Beer, gardening, conservation, Local history.
Little Love Lost for SMO
SMO is a very useful way of automating a wide range of routine database jobs, but Phil Factor laments Microsoft's apparent ambivalence towards the technology, including a lack of anything remotely resembling adequate documentation.
2011-11-28
206 reads
Don't Criticize Code
For anyone eager for a long-term career in IT Development, humility and tact are probably more important habits to acquire than demon coding-skills. Phil Factor explains why.
2011-11-14
317 reads
Never offend a captive audience
Write what you choose to when the reader can, in turn, choose not to read your work; but when you are writing about Technology, you have a captive audience. They need to read your work to keep abreast of the technology. Don't gratuitously offend them. It is not the action of a gentleman, D____it!
2011-11-07
119 reads
Function to Expand Tab Characters
A function to replace tab characters with the correct number of spaces to align the text as originally intended.
2011-09-29 (first published: 2007-10-11)
2,214 reads
Roman Numerals to integers, and Vice Versa, in SQL:
Here are a couple of functions to convert between roman numerals and integers. They are handy for all sorts of...
2011-09-20
21,237 reads
Now you ODBC me now you don't
Phil Factor reflects on Microsoft's "handbrake turn" on OLE DB; Denali's successor will have to have all this plumbing ripped out to replace it with the older ODBC technology. It's a surprising move but makes a lot of sense, given the ubiquity of ODBC drivers for relational data access.
2011-09-12
286 reads
Piracy and Agile
Do Agile IT projects have anything to learn from the organizational structures and laws used by pirates? Phil Factor is not convinced.
2011-09-05
119 reads
Brute-force searching for data.
Today, I needed a way of searching through a database, any database, looking for a certain string. The procedure I...
2011-07-08
3,811 reads
Belt and braces
A moment ago, I was deep in some coding. What it was is not entirely relevant, With a page-full of...
2011-06-30
2,588 reads
Blogs
Finding Balance: Things Will Come Up
By Steve Jones
I have a presentation on finding balance in your career that got quite a...
Who Are You Doing It For?
By Brian Kelley
But as I've matured over the years, I came to realize that I needed...
Presenting Twice in May 2026
By alevyinroc
I will be presenting my latest session, Documenting Your Work for Worry-Free Vacations, in-person...
Forums
How to change the FDLaunch Error log file location
The file FDLAUNCHERRORLOG gets created in the default <instance>\MSSQL\Log folder. So far, I've found...
what data type i should use for roversion col and can i use less than greater
can i use Rowversioncol ( in my database it's synonyme timestamp is used) to...
Radius Latitude Longitude
I have a table with latitude longitude in the format. 45.123456 , -111.123456 ,...
Question of the Day
A Fun Computer Quote
Which movie featured this quote?
"All programs have a desire to be useful."Happy April Fools! See possible answers