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
889 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
319 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
122 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)
2,222 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
21,275 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
3,817 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
2,590 reads
Blogs
Microsoft MVP 2026: Ten Years on the Data Platform
I’m honored to announce that I’ve been renewed as a Microsoft MVP for the...
Building AgentDBA’s Slack Escalation
By Arun Sirpal
Until now, a CRITICAL finding did the right internal routing, but the last mile...
Changing the Owner Removes Permissions: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
This is actually inspired by an article SQL Server Central, which taught me something...
Forums
Developer edition cannot connect from other computers
I installed a new SQL server 2025 Enterprise developer edition for our development environment....
How Clustering can be Used as a Preprocessing Technique for Classification in Azure Machine Learning
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Clustering can be Used...
Moving the Error Log
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Moving the Error Log
Question of the Day
Moving the Error Log
How can I change the location in which the SQL Server error log is written in SQL Server 2025?
See possible answers