When I was editing my chapter on implementing a database, I noticed a really nice improvement in the error message I had from the previous edition of the book. Instead of just telling me that there was a value in my modification statement that duplicated an existing value (or multiple values affected by the statement), it told me the duplicated ...

Reigniting the [SCDEndDate] debate In November 2009 I wrote a blog post entitled Debunking Kimball Effective Dates where I stated that I was against the Kimball-recommended practice of maintaining a StartDate & EndDate value for every record in a type 2 slowly changing dimension (SCD) table (i.e. the values highlighted in blue in the ...

One complaint about SEQUENCE is that there is no simple construct such as NEXT (@n) VALUES FOR so that you could get a range of SEQUENCE values as a set.  In a previous post about SEQUENCE, I mentioned that to get a range of rows, you should use the system stored procedure sys.sp_sequence_get_range.  If you've tried this stored ...

SQL Server 2011 introduces a feature that Oracle professionals will certainly recognize: SEQUENCE.  SEQUENCE allows you to define a central place where SQL Server will maintain a counter of values for you.  The last-used value is stored in memory and so no storage is required.  Here is an example: CREATE SEQUENCE ...

Every year at PASS, I do the same thing. I hmm and haw over which sessions I want to go to, and I end up making some tough choices at game time.  This year I believe I'll be pretty busy, so my typical pie-in-the-sky view of how much I'll be able to attend just isn't going to pan out.  Instead, I have selected 5 sessions that I really ...