As an outsider to your organisation, it is really hard to see that a DR that only gets tested twice a year is going to...

Life would be so much simpler if everything had a clear and unambiguous name, but I fear it will never happen. Even...

What is wrong with

UPDATE yourtable

SET Postcode = Replace(Postcode, ' ', ' ')

FROM yourtable

WHERE postcode LIKE N'___...

For many years I worked at Totaljobs Group where we relied on SQL replication to provide scale-out to support our web sites. We had more experience with keeping replication...

If you are installing anything below SQL 2014 then the SQLAgent account is the first account that gets validated. If it comes up with an error this may mean...

Hi Rankberg, I think for a small app like you are describing then your approach of understanding the Cobol screen layouts may give the fastest results. Best of luck

It can be fun when management design systems, especially when they do not know what technology options are available or how they perform. It gives a lot of work...

If you have not found them already, there are some IMS to relational conversion products available. BMC Software now owns the NEON product suite of IMS conversion stuff that...

Jeff, I had totally forgotten frederico's point about copybooks. This turns what looks like a single parent single child relationship into a generalised parent/children relationship, with as many parent...

If the business want data retention for 100 years, you need to ask the business a difficult question...

Do they just want the data retained, but with no means to present...

Jeff, certainly doing a 1 to 1 mapping of what IMS calls Segments into relational tables will give a reasonable first-cut design.

Most of the mapped tables will have...

I think almost regardless of the initial direction from your managers, you need to present business cases for a) migrating the existing app to new technology but with just its...

You are talking about re-authoring the DB design and re-authoring the application program. From my viewpoint that is the time to stop saying this is a migration and start...

I would certainly aim for SQL 2016. You are at the start of your planning, so no way will you be ready to go live before SQL 2016 is...

If you sign up to the free Visual Studio Dev Essentials program then you can download and install SQL Server Developer Edition for free. This will give you Analysis...