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
Phil Factor
- Interests: Motorbikes, Beer, gardening, conservation, Local history.
Inserting Markup into a String with SQL
In which Phil illustrates an old trick using STUFF to intert a number of substrings from a table into a string, and explains why the technique might speed up your code...
2009-02-18
1,631 reads
Every DBA's nightmare
When a copy of all 25 million of the UK’s child benefit records, including bank details, went missing in the post, whilst being sent to the NAO (National Audit Office) on 18th October, the UK government must have known that a cover-up was impossible. This sort of incident is every DBA’s nightmare.
2007-11-26
173 reads
Blogs
“We love to debate minutiae”
By Brian Kelley
I am guilty as charged. The quote was in reference to how people argue...
Advice I Like: Knots
By Steve Jones
Learn how to tie a bowline knot. Practice in the dark. With one hand....
Shifting Mindsets: Why FinOps is Essential for Cloud Efficiency
By HeyMo0sh
As a DevOps practitioner, I’ve always focused on performance, scalability, and automation. But as...
Forums
Windows logins for users migrated from DomainA to DomainB
Hi, I have a SQL Server instance where users connect to via Windows Authentication,...
Multiple Deployment Processes
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How to Use sqlpackage to Detect Schema Drift Between Azure SQL Databases
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How to Use sqlpackage to...
Question of the Day
Upgrading Admin Queries
I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?
See possible answers