March 2013 - Posts

• Adding clocks when working globally

  Since Windows Vista, Windows users have had the ability to add clocks. I’m in the U.S. Central time zone and have no problem thinking about scheduling meetings with people in the Eastern and Pacific time zones. Hyderabad is a different matter because Read More... Posted Thursday, March 28, 2013 9:18 PM by John Paul Cook | 1 Comments

• BI Beginner: Data Explorer is a must have

  Data Explorer will speed up and simplify your data analysis by at least an order of magnitude. It makes data just work for me. No fighting or struggling, it just works. Step 1. Go here and download the Data Explorer Preview for Excel 2013 or Excel 2010. Read More... Posted Monday, March 25, 2013 11:50 PM by John Paul Cook | 3 Comments

• Diagnosing differences between production and development

  There are many reasons you can have different results in your production environment than in your development environment. In database applications, two major causes are differences in database schemas and differences in the data. Application code and Read More... Posted Sunday, March 24, 2013 7:43 PM by John Paul Cook | 1 Comments

• implicit data type conversion and COALESCE

  Implicit data type conversion can cause both unexpected and undesirable results. Using the same design pattern for one data type and extending it to other data types can get you into trouble if implicit data type conversion occurs. The following code Read More... Posted Sunday, March 17, 2013 4:11 PM by John Paul Cook | 0 Comments

• SSMS generating non-ANSI scripts

  When using SSMS to script a database object that had been created with ANSI compliant syntax, I noticed that the generated script was not ANSI compliant. Have you noticed anything like this? It's more of an annoyance than a bug, but it is not the desired Read More... Posted Wednesday, March 13, 2013 9:20 PM by John Paul Cook | 2 Comments

• DISTINCT and ORDER BY

  Using DISTINCT is another one of those examples where people's experiences don't always match the truth. Using DISTINCT without an ORDER BY probably returns the results in order. If your experience tells you that your results are ordered whenever you Read More... Posted Sunday, March 10, 2013 3:40 PM by John Paul Cook | 0 Comments

• Free OCR

  Today I saw something on the screen that was text. It was needed as text, but I couldn’t select it. OCR to the rescue! If you have OneNote, there’s an easy way to do OCR without any extra software. There are also free websites that can convert screen Read More... Posted Friday, March 08, 2013 8:58 PM by John Paul Cook | 1 Comments

• Views and ORDER BY

  The general rule is that a view can't be created using a statement that contains an ORDER BY clause. There is a workaround that some people believe works. Similar to my recent post on using an ORDER BY with UNION ALL, the empirical facts don't always Read More... Posted Wednesday, March 06, 2013 8:16 PM by John Paul Cook | 4 Comments

• Using the Query Designer to convert non-ANSI joins to ANSI

  If you have legacy code that you are upgrading, the Query Designer can convert old style joins to ANSI joins. You can invoke the Query Designer from the Query menu in the SSMS toolbar or by pressing the Ctrl Shift Q three key combination, which is what Read More... Posted Saturday, March 02, 2013 1:35 PM by John Paul Cook | 0 Comments