One of the most popular questions on forums / SO etc is, “How can i find out who dropped a table, truncated a table, dropped a procedure….” etc.   Im sure we have all been there,  something changes ( maybe … Continue reading →

If there is one process that should be simpler than it is out of the box, it is creating Excel spreadsheets from SSIS.   Over the years i’ve tried doing it a number of ways, using the built in component, … Continue reading →

Im not a big clustering/HA expert, but I obviously understand the need for such things to exist 🙂 However, the standard SQL tooling, SSMS etc, seems to go out of its way to make the MultiSubNetFailover option as inaccessible and convoluted … Continue reading →

I haven’t gotten to involved in the whole “Big Data” movement to much,  I’ve kept an arms length watch and played around with a few of those technologies but never really jumped in and got down and dirty.  However, with … Continue reading →

I’ve been developing T-SQL for about 20 years now and almost since day one there has been functionality that , IMO, has been missing.  That is grouped string concatenation (ie forming a delimited string ) and string split ( breaking … Continue reading →

Sometimes it does feel that a problem is a database problem until proven otherwise.  When this does occur I have had to put a lot of time and effort into demonstrating the hows and whys.  One of the easiest ( … Continue reading →

Hi Unfortunately due to matters outside of my control, SQL Saturday 502 in Edinburgh has been cancelled, I would like to thank the team though for selecting my pre-con.  Let me know if you would have liked to attend and … Continue reading →

At my present client, part of the task I have to under take is to re-engineer the “Cold Storage”. This is ~20Terabytes of compressed CSVs going back over 15 years or so. Presently these are held on aging and creaking … Continue reading →

So another great SQLBits is done and dusted, many thanks to the team, helpers and sponsors for putting on such a great event. It’s always a pleasure and honour to be able to present here and to get to spend … Continue reading →

A long time ago I looked at some reasons as to why persisted computed columns ( and therefore indexes on those columns) are not used (Part1, Part2). Recently I was drawn into an issue where the same thing was happening, a … Continue reading →