As well as the items mentioned in your article, I think it would be useful if the training could include input from people at the coal-face in various departments so...

You often need a bigger team to build a system than you do to keep it running once implemented, so it makes sense for some of that team to be...

I frequently get asked for one-off extracts from our data warehouse which I save as spreadsheets with meaningful names like Reconciliation Failures. Then, inevitably, the "one-off" gets requested repeatedly (often...

I once worked at a company where HR was referred to as "Human Remains". I think that says a lot about that company's culture.

First, create a table-valued function that can be re-used elsewhere such as the one below which I originally found somewhere on this site. Then use the function to remove any...

Interesting article, but TRUNCATE TABLE can be rolled back.

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS dbo.bob;
CREATE TABLE dbo.bob (bob_id INT IDENTITY(1, 1), bob_code VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL);

INSERT dbo.bob
(
   ...

When I was doing technical support for a mainframe package at a software house we had one customer where the IT director was absolutely obsessed with his new toy. He...

I've spent 2 weeks (so far) testing and tweaking a "minor" change to automate a manual process that provides month-end data for use in reporting. If I get this wrong,...

We've been stuck on 2016 for a long time and the thing I'm looking forward to most is not specific to 2025. It's the change to the "string or binary...

Ah yes, Shadow IT. I've had several cases where a solution has been built in a combination of Access, Excel and Word. It works fine until the data volume reaches...

I spent all the first 36 years of my career working in the office and didn't think twice about the commute. When we all had to WFH in 2020, I...

I think using deployment frequency as a metric is a bit like measuring programmer productivity by counting key strokes. You'd need a means of subtracting deployments that were necessary to...

This looks similar to a problem I posted a few years back (link below). It appears that there are some situations where data conversion is attempted before the filters are...

Going down to a 2 day week sounds lovely in theory. In practice, will our employers pay us the same for 2 days as they do now for 5? I...

This query will list the foreign keys defined in the database.

SELECT fk.name AS fk_name, ts.name AS sub_table, cs.name sub_table_column, tm.name AS master_table, cm.name AS master_table_column
FROM sys.foreign_keys fk
INNER...