My home office setup

• by Randolph West

• Born SQL with Randolph West

That aging hippie (he likes Apple products and has a goatee) known as Brent Ozar wrote a post recently about his home office studio setup, with a big focus...

2020-01-22

36 reads

Don’t install SQL Server from a mounted ISO

• by Randolph West

• Born SQL with Randolph West

Here’s something that seems to keep coming up, but not frequently enough for me to write a blog post about until now: You should not install SQL Server from...

2020-01-15

92 reads

The curious case of the sqlcmd password

• by Randolph West

• Born SQL with Randolph West

In August last year I posted about a command line parser problem I ran into with AzCopy, which I eventually resolved by writing a batch file and escaping a...

2020-01-08

16 reads

Looking ahead to 2020

• by Randolph West

• Born SQL with Randolph West

This week all I want to say is Happy New Year, and may 2020 be the start of a successful decade for you. Live, love, learn. Remember to take...

2020-01-01

10 reads

Temporal Tables, and how to deal with computed columns

• by Randolph West

• Born SQL with Randolph West

Long time readers will know I’m a big fan of Temporal Tables since their introduction in SQL Server 2016. Thanks to my friend Erik Darling (blog | Twitter), I...

2019-12-25

209 reads

Compression in SQL Server: COMPRESS and DECOMPRESS

• by Randolph West

• Born SQL with Randolph West

On Twitter recently, I asked: Does anyone I know use the COMPRESS and DECOMPRESS features in T-SQL? To those who replied in the affirmative, I asked: What made you...

2019-12-18

126 reads

A guide to acronyms, abbreviations, and other technical terms

• by Randolph West

• Born SQL with Randolph West

Here’s a list of some technical terms, acronyms, and abbreviations you may have heard, and what they mean. Some of the definitions are taken from Wikipedia. This list is...

2019-12-11

28 reads

The XML data type is not immutable

• by Randolph West

• Born SQL with Randolph West

Immutability In many programming languages, strings of text are immutable, meaning they don’t change. When you modify a string, a new string is created in memory by copying the...

2019-12-04

100 reads

Installing SQL Server on Windows? Don’t forget these two useful switches

• by Randolph West

• Born SQL with Randolph West

A few days ago on Twitter I wrote: Couldn’t connect to new SQL Server install because I forgot to enable TCP/IP. I’m the lead author for a Microsoft Press...

2019-11-20

45 reads

Did you know we have another SQL Server book coming out?

• by Randolph West

• Born SQL with Randolph West

SQL Server 2017 Administration Inside Out was the first technical book I contributed to, and all its authors were very happy with how it turned out. All the content...

2019-11-13

34 reads