The secret skill revealed in the dusty booklet
Going through one’s father’s belongings after his death is
always a poignant, bitter-sweet experience. I was going through his most
precious books...
2009-06-18
1,985 reads
Phil Factor
- Interests: Motorbikes, Beer, gardening, conservation, Local history.
CLR Triggers in SQL Servers
Do CLR triggers really represent the most popular usage of CLR in enterprise SQL Servers? Phil Factor wants to know if this is the case, and if so, what on earth are they doing?
2009-06-08
503 reads
Intruding into Dummy Websites
Phil Factor muses on security, bayonets, and databases, and somehow manages to pull it all together in this editorial.
2009-06-02
203 reads
Teched Water Bottle
One of the charming people who helped me register at Teched told me where we, who had registered, could get...
2009-05-10
1,705 reads
The Walking Billboard
I spent a fascinating hour at the Teched Shop this afternoon. I was trying to get a feel for where...
2009-05-10
1,276 reads
Confessions of an IT Manager, 2nd Edition
The software industry is, just occasionally, more absurd than one would dare to imagine. Having spent most of his working life in its clutches, Phil Factor has pretty much "seen it all" and what's more he's prepared to tell what he knows. The second edition of Phil's "Confessions of an IT Manager" contains Phil's full repertoire of tales of institutional mayhem and software projects gone awry.
- Download free eBook
- Printed book:
2009-05-07
2,520 reads
Professor Hugh Bin-Haad.
Steve Jones isn't usually the wild man of publishing, but on April 1st, a strangely
anarchic spirit breaks loose. Having...
2009-04-03
1,491 reads
The Visit of the Recovery Testers.
Phil has a nasty surprise when a team of testers turn up to test an n-tier system
2009-03-30
109 reads
Accessing results in a random order: Towards the automated Thank-you letter
Phil shows how 'CROSS APPLY' can be useful for writing thank-you letters or thinking of excuses as to why your project has failed....
2009-03-18
3,881 reads
Accessing results in a random order: Towards the automated Thank-you letter
Most of the time, you want to have a SQL result in a particular order. Occasionally you just don't care....
2009-03-16
3,123 reads
Blogs
AI: Blog a Day – Day 5: Notebooks, Hugging face models and Fine Tuning
By Vinay Thakur
Continuing from Day 4 where we learned Encoder, Decoder, and Attention Mechanism, today we...
AI: Blog a Day – Day 4: Transformers – Encoder, Decoder, and Attention
By Vinay Thakur
Continuing from Day 3 where we covered LLM models open/closed and their parameters, Today...
Flyway Tips: Multiple Projects
By Steve Jones
One of the nice things about Flyway Desktop is that it helps you manage...
Forums
Can an Azure App Service Managed Identity be used for SQL Login?
I'm fairly certain I know the answer to this from digging into it yesterday,...
Azure Synapse database refresh
Hi Team, I am trying to refresh the Azure Synapse Dedicated pool from production...
how to write this query?
hi everyone I am not sure how to write the query that will produce...
Question of the Day
Fun with JSON I
I have some data in a table:
CREATE TABLE #test_data
(
id INT PRIMARY KEY,
name VARCHAR(100),
birth_date DATE
);
-- Step 2: Insert rows
INSERT INTO #test_data
VALUES
(1, 'Olivia', '2025-01-05'),
(2, 'Emma', '2025-03-02'),
(3, 'Liam', '2025-11-15'),
(4, 'Noah', '2025-12-22');
If I run this query, how many rows are returned?
SELECT *
FROM OPENJSON(
(
SELECT t.* FROM #test_data AS t FOR JSON PATH
)
) t; See possible answers