There is a large secretive enterprise ETL company whose product is quite possibly the most powerful and easy to use tool on the planet.

I find with SSIS that when I...

Lets suppose you are launching a new line of business. It's a bit of a punt. You hope it will be wildly successful but equally it might not.

Do...

Eric M Russell (10/15/2013)

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Today, in the fall of 2013, how may of us are using SQL Server Azure or EC2 in a production environment?

I don't mean a database feeding your...

If I resigned and the split was amicable I'd be expected to work my notice.

If I resigned and the split was acrimonious I'd want early release from my contract. ...

Ditto from me.

Backups fine, restores...not so much

Full-text searching has always been something of a disappointment for me.

SSIS is one of those tools that when I come back to it I spend a week swearing at it...

Encrypt your data backups.

Store the certificates used to encrypt your backups somewhere else but equally secure.

Limit access to both the certificates and the backups to a tightly and formally designed...

It's a harsh fact of life and a quick look down the list of fixes in the older versions of SQL Server reveal some quite nasty bugs.

There is inherrent complexity...

There's big by design and big by lack of design.

Big doesn't necessarily mean complex or difficult it really does depend on your use case. For example, the Microsoft Fastrack...

@charles, exactly so.

One of the implementations of Soundex stored the soundex value of a holiday destinations in an indexed field.

When the customer entered a location the system would...

The hardest part of TDD for me was the change in mind set I needed to make. Couple that to the difference between app development and db development and it...

Don't put Soundex inside the difference function as Soundex comparison is implicit in the function.

select Difference(Soundex('Brighton'),Soundex('Bob')) -- Returns 4

select Difference('Brighton','Bob') --Returns 1

Take a look at http://ntz-develop.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/phonetic-algorithms.html

The Rolls Royce solution is Metaphone3 which I believe is in the latest Apache SOLR.

I had planned a followup article based on the link above. ...

Oh bugger, you can tell I don't do much .Net work!

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This...