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
866 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
205 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
316 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
117 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)
2,208 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
21,204 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
3,809 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
2,587 reads
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Forums
Why the following cmds in sequence do not work
I need to delete rows from both the temporal main and history tables. The...
When SQL Server Central Went Down
Comments posted to this topic are about the item When SQL Server Central Went...
The String Distance I
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The String Distance I
Question of the Day
The String Distance I
In SQL Server 2025, what is returned by this code:
SELECT EDIT_DISTANCE('tim', 'tom')
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