I posted a few hours ago about a reflection of the Summit, but I wanted to write another one for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Chris Yates. In January of this year, Adam Jorgensen and I joked around in a video that was used for the SQL Server 2012 launch. We were asked about SQLFamily, and we said how we were like brothers – how we ...

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 ...

I owe my career to the SQL Server community, specifically the Internet SQL Server community, so this month’s T-SQL Tuesday is especially poignant. I changed careers “cold” about eight years ago, and, while I had some educational background in computer science, I had relatively little real-world DBA experience. Someone gave me a shot in the form of ...

A non-SQL MVP friend of mine, who also happens to be a client, asked me for some help again last week. I was planning on writing this up even before Rob Volk (@sql_r) listed his T-SQL Tuesday topic for this month. Earlier in the year, I (well, LobsterPot Solutions, although I’d been the person mostly involved) had helped out with a merge ...

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 ...

Today’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Aaron Nelson (@sqlvariant | sqlvariant.com) has the theme Logging. I was a little pressed for time today to pull this post together, so this will be short and sweet. For a long time, I wondered why and how a database in Full Recovery Mode, which you’d expect to have an ever-growing log -- as all changes are ...

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 ...

Some people question the ethics of writing about my company on my blog. But I don’t have a problem with it. Is it ethical to ignore the concerns of others and to just do what I want? Anyway – it’s relevant for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, which Chris Shaw is hosting on the topic of ethics, so I’m going to write a few things about integrity and ...

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 ...

This T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Argenis Fernandez (Blog|Twitter) is devoted to the question, “Are you a Jack-of-all-Trades? Or a specialist?” This question really hits home for me, on a number of levels. (Aside: I have huge respect for Argenis – he’s smart, funny, no-nonsense, very accomplished. If you don’t follow him, do.) If you have read ...