January 2012 - Posts

• Suggested Best Practises and naming conventions

  Once upon a time I blogged at http://consultingblogs.emc.com/jamiethomson but that ended in August 2009 when I left EMC. There is a lot of (arguably) valuable content over there however certain events in the past leave me concerned that that content is Read More... Posted Sunday, January 29, 2012 7:08 PM by jamiet | 9 Comments Filed under: naming conventions, repost, sql server integration services, ssis

• Thoughts on Test Driven Database Development

  Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a software development practise that has been around for a few years. Wikipedia describes it as: Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development process that relies on the repetition of a very short development Read More... Posted Thursday, January 26, 2012 9:30 AM by jamiet | 15 Comments Filed under: agile, Datadude, DBPro, TDD, Test-Driven Development, unit testing

• Whatever happened to Twitter Annotations?

  In April 2010 Twitter announced a new feature that they would soon be introducing - Twitter Annotations. Put simply Twitter Annotations can be described as the ability to attach metadata to a tweet; think hashtags on steroids. Lots of people were quite Read More... Posted Wednesday, January 25, 2012 10:46 AM by jamiet | 3 Comments Filed under: random waffle, twitter

• Use VALUES clause to get the maximum value from some columns [SQL Server, T-SQL]

  My ex-colleague Paul Mcmillan pointed me at a thread on Stack Overflow that demonstrated a neat T-SQL trick to get the maximum value from a collection of columns in a row. Paul had never seen it before and neither had I so I figure one or two of you out Read More... Posted Friday, January 20, 2012 2:22 PM by jamiet | 7 Comments Filed under: sql server, t-sql

• Get the SQLBits agenda in your phone's calendar

  For SQLBits 8 in April 2011 I published a calendar containing all of the sessions from the conference ; anyone could subscribe to that calendar on their phone or calendar service (i.e. Hotmail or Google Calendar). For the upcoming SQLBits X conference Read More... Posted Wednesday, January 18, 2012 12:36 PM by jamiet | 3 Comments Filed under: iCalendar, SQLBits

• Implementing SQL Server solutions using Visual Studio 2010 Database Projects – a compendium of project experiences

  Over the past eighteen months I have worked on four separate projects for customers that wanted to make use of Visual Studio 2010 Database projects to manage their database schema.* All the while I have been trying to take lots of notes in order that Read More... Posted Sunday, January 01, 2012 7:13 PM by jamiet | 28 Comments Filed under: Continuous Integration, Datadude, DBPro, sql server, SSDT, Visual Studio 2010