SQL Server Reporting Services plays nicely. You can have things in the catalogue that get shared. You can have Reports that have Links, Datasets that can be used across different reports, and Data Sources that can be used in a variety of ways too. So if you find that someone has deleted a shared data source, you potentially have a bit of a horror ...

Four years ago, I was preparing to speak at TechEd Australia. I’d been asked to give a session on “T-SQL Tips and Tricks”, but I’d pushed back and we’d gone with “T-SQL Tips and Techniques” instead. I hadn’t wanted to show Tricks, because despite being a fan of ‘magicians’ (like Tommy Cooper) I feel like the trickery should disappear with the ...

MERGE is very cool. There are a ton of useful things about it – mostly around the fact that you can implement a ton of change against a table all at once. This is great for data warehousing, handling changes made to relational databases by applications, all kinds of things. One of the more subtle things about MERGE is the power of the OUTPUT ...

I don’t tend to find that anything about me gets described as “Fabulous”. It’s not a word I ever use myself, so I was slightly amused to see it here. It’s going to be an interesting week (in May, Monday 14th to Saturday 19th), in which I have two stints in classrooms (the three day course in downtown Chicago and this pre-con), plus two ...

This coming Tuesday sees a midweek SQL Saturday hit Adelaide. LobsterPot’s a sponsor, as are a bunch of other companies. An all day event, with two tracks featuring some of the best material you’ve ever seen presented. I’m presenting too. The thing I really want to draw your attention to is that we have two sessions from Paul White. If you ...

SQL 2012 brings us a bunch of new analytic functions, together with enhancements to the OVER clause. People who have known me over the years will remember that I’m a big fan of the OVER clause and the types of things that it brings us when applied to aggregate functions, as well as the ranking functions that it enables. The OVER clause was ...

April is here, and this weekend, SQL v11.0 (previous known as Denali, now known as SQL Server 2012) reaches general availability. And so I thought I’d share some news about what’s coming next. I didn’t hear this at the MVP Summit earlier this year (where there was lots of NDA information given, but I didn’t go), so I think I’m free to share ...

In May, I’ll be in the US. I have board meetings for PASS at the SQLRally event in Dallas, and then I’m going to be spending a bit of time in Chicago. The big news is that while I’m in Chicago (May 14-16), I’m going to teach my “Advanced T-SQL Querying and Reporting: Building Effectiveness” course. This is a course that I’ve been teaching ...

A few days after the end of 24HOP, I find myself reflecting on it. I’m still waiting on most of the information. I want to be able to discover things like where the countries represented on each of the sessions, and things like that. So far, I have the feedback scores and the numbers of attendees. The data was provided in a PDF, so while I wait ...

There’s a bunch of stuff going on at the moment in the SQL world, so if you’ve missed this particular piece of news, let me tell you a bit about it. Twice a year, the SQL community puts on its biggest virtual event – 24 Hours of PASS. And the next one is tomorrow – March 21st, 2012. Twenty-four sessions, back-to-back, featuring a selection of ...