I’m fascinated by the way people learn. I’m told there are several methods people use to understand new information, from reading to watching, from experiencing to exploring. Personally, I use multiple methods of learning when I encounter a new topic, usually starting with reading a bit about the concepts. I quickly want to put those into ...

If you want to be wise, watch the actions and outcomes of others. Emulate the successful actions, and avoid the actions that cause failure. That’s true in life in general - and in technology projects in specific.  I’ve worked with several clients who have created or migrated an application to “the cloud” - meaning using Microsoft Windows ...

Developing in Windows Azure is at once not that much different from what you’re familiar with in on-premises systems, and different in significant ways. Because of these differences, developers often ask about the specific process to develop and deploy a Windows Azure application - more formally called an Application Lifecycle Management, or ALM. ...

I read Jeffery Hicks’ article in this month’s Redmond Magazine on a new add-in for Windows PowerShell 2.0. It’s called the PowerShell Pack and it has a some great new features that I plan to put into place on my production systems as soon as I finished learning and testing them. You can download the pack here if you have PowerShell 2.0. I’m ...

SQL Server has a few mechanisms to reach out to another server (even another server type) and query data from within a Transact-SQL statement. Among them are a set of stored credentials and information (called a Linked Server), a statement that uses a linked server called called OPENQUERY, another called OPENROWSET, and one called OPENDATASOURCE. ...

Most data professionals I’ve met work in two modes: we plan for our day, and we react to the situations around us. I’m staring at my list of things that I need to do today right now, which is my planned work. Of course, I have no idea how much of that will really get done – it’s optimistic to be sure. On the other hand I have several systems I ...

In SQL Server, there are times that you need to do things in the operating system, and to allow that there is a feature called CmdExec. This is not always a good thing –whenever you leave the confines of SQL Server and go out to the operating system, you can cause issues, not the least of which are security-related. This best practice is ...

I have scripts that re-create my databases for testing and development purposes. But sometimes I want to take the data from a set of tables and move it as well – I could use SSIS, or a SELECT INTO statement, but what if I want to “re-set” the data to a point in time? In other words, load it with some “base data”? I thought this might be a good ...

Yesterday I blogged about changing a Primary Key (PK) during the design phase, and before you have data in the database. Even then, it’s not trivial to change the data type or column(s) that make(s) up the PK. When you have data in that Primary Key and/or you have Foreign Keys (FK) that point to a PK field, this becomes a much more involved ...

A setting that I noticed a while back when looking at sys.configurations was disallow results from triggers.  Triggers are one of my favorite subjects, and you will find a lot of good uses of them in my book (triggers are also well named, as poor usage of them will allow you to shoot your foot off in a heartbeat as I discussed in my earlier ...