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
890 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
217 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
322 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
123 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)
2,224 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
21,293 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
290 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
121 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
3,826 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
2,593 reads
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Question of the Day
Backing Up a DMK
In SQL Server 2025, I have a database with a Database Masker Key (DMK). I want to back up this key and keep a copy offline. When do I have to open this key before running the backup?
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