Podcasts (Tuesday, May 26, 2009) - These days there are so many useful sources of information for software developers: websites, user groups, message boards, second life events, conferences, not to mention good old print mediums such as magazines and books. In the last few years another interesting means of content delivery has come into play with the proliferation of portable mp3 players... podcasts.
SQL 2008's MERGE statement (Tuesday, April 22, 2008) - One of the coolest new features of SQL Server 2008 (and there are many) is the MERGE statement. This construct has existed in oracle and DB2 for a while now but it's new to SQL Server. Effectively it allows you to merge two tables together, combining UPDATE, INSERTS and DELETEs into one nifty package. For the purposes of demonstration I'm going to provide a simple
CTE Concatenation (Monday, January 01, 2007) - In the past concatenating string values across rows in T-SQL is the kind of thing that typically involved recursive UDFs, temp tables, or some such. Another option was introduced with CTEs back in SQL 2005 which can be recursive. For an example I'm essentially going to combine a table of words into sentences. Consider this structure: declare @words table ( ID
SQL 2008 filtered indexes (Wednesday, June 11, 2008) - there are so many cool new features available in sql server 2008 that many a DBA are excited. as an index-tuning man i've been intrigued by filtered indexes which essentially allow you to slap a WHERE clause on an index making it small and focused on a strategic subset of the tables data. you know, the sort of thing that would have required an indexed view in the past. in
SQL 2008 and powershell (Sunday, January 25, 2009) - with the 2008 releases from microsoft powershell is really making its way into the mainstream. sql server 2008 ships with standard powershell as well as an add-in that provides an interesting degree of integration that will allow DBAs to write scripts that are far more generalized than T-SQL scripts. getting ready to play with it is pretty strait forward. all you
SSRS scripting with RS.EXE (Tuesday, November 20, 2007) - At work we've recently deployed SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and it's been quite interesting. In general I love the product but of course as with everything there are situations where you have to do more than the management tools provide and you have to write some scripts. SSRS provides an interesting scripting facility, RS.EXE, which allows you to run VB
SQL 2008 FILESTREAM (Saturday, August 04, 2007) - this post was written during the early release candidates and the actual implementation has changed slightly. your mileage may vary with this post. over the years people have attempted to put large amounts of non relational data in SQL. images strike me as the most popular case. generally people either stored the data directly in SQL or stored it on the filesystem
SQL 2008's table valued parameters (Sunday, May 11, 2008) - One of my favorite new features available in SQL 2008 is table valued parameters. For years SQL developers have been dying for this abilty and have been throwing some miserable duct tape at the problem. Before sql 2005 it was common to see strings being passed into stored procedures and then parsed into temporary tables. This approach suffered several major disadvantages
Employing Solr/Lucene with SQL Server for Full-Text Searching (Saturday, December 05, 2009) - I've been fiddling with Lucene a good bit of late and have been quite impressed. It's more than just a "blazing fast" full-text indexing system, especially when implemented via Solr. With Solr it becomes an incredibly scalable, full-featured and extensible search engine platform. I had always assumed that the Lucene stack wasn't for me. For the most part I
