This month’s T-SQL Tuesday post is about LOB data http://sqlblog.com/blogs/michael_coles/archive/2010/05/03/t-sql-tuesday-006-what-about-blob.aspx.   For this one I decided to post a sample Tiger/Line SQL database I use all the time in live demos. For those who aren't familiar with it, Tiger/Line data is a dataset published by the U.S. ...

Invitation for T-SQL Tuesday #006:  ''What About BLOB?''   It's getting warm outside just in time for the May T-SQL Tuesday blog party.  I’ll be your host this month--and the secret word for this T-SQL Tuesday is ''Large Object (LOB) Data''.       What’s T-SQL Tuesday?   About 6 months ago Adam ...

New Jersey SQL Server User Group (NJSQL) is bringing SQLSaturday #39 to NYC on April 24, 2010!  The free all-day training event will be hosted by Microsoft at their Midtown Manhattan offices.  The speaker line-up is growing fast—if you'd like to present, visit the event's open call for speakers.  This is a free full-day ...

It's well-known by now that SQL Server 2005 and 2008 include new encryption-related statements that allow you to create and administer encryption keys. You can use CREATE CERTIFICATE to create or import a certificate or DROP ASYMMETRIC KEY to remove an asymmetric key from the database, for instance.  One of the interesting ommissions ...

During the XML Optimization presentation today I'll refer back to the sample code posted at http://www.apress.com/book/downloadfile/4021.  I'll also update this post with additional sample code by tomorrow. UPDATE: The PowerPoint presentation and sample code are attached to this post in the ZIP file. Jacob Sebastian's book ''The Art of ...

SQL Server 2008 has an impressive array of encryption features -- cell-level symmetric and asymmetric encryption, key management, EKM, TDE, and more. But they do have some limitations. Symmetric encryption functions, for instance, can only encrypt slightly less than 8,000 bytes of data (the additional information like random IV and ...

In response to a challenge from Pinal Dave, a fellow MVP and a winner of an award for his blog at the MVP Summit 2009, I am writing a couple of articles to demonstrate practical uses for SQL Server’s XML capabilities.  (Dave’s great blog is at http://blog.sqlauthority.com/). Dave posted the first post in this series over at ...