April 2010 - Posts

• Presentations about SARGability tomorrow

  Tomorrow, via LiveMeeting, I’m giving two presentations about SARGability. That’s April 27th , for anyone reading this later. The first will be at the Adelaide SQL Server User Group . If you’re in Adelaide, you should definitely come along. Both meetings Read More... Posted Monday, April 26, 2010 2:40 PM by Rob Farley | 1 Comments Filed under: adssug, community, sql

• SQLBits VI – The sixth sets

  My involvement stopped with the tagline, but SQLBits VI is on tomorrow. The theme of the event is Performance Tuning, which has nothing to do with Bruce Willis or dead people – unless Bruce Willis has just become a database expert and been shot for doing Read More... Posted Thursday, April 15, 2010 8:06 PM by Rob Farley | 2 Comments Filed under: community

• Handling special characters with FOR XML PATH('')

  Because I hate seeing > or & in my results… Since SQL Server 2005, we’ve been able to use FOR XML PATH('') to do string concatenation. I’ve blogged about it before several times. But I don’t think I’ve blogged about the fact that it all Read More... Posted Thursday, April 15, 2010 3:35 PM by Rob Farley | 34 Comments Filed under: sql

• Exploding maps in Reporting Services 2008 R2 - T-SQL Tuesday #005

  Kaboom! Well, that was the imagery that secretly appeared in my mind when I saw “USA By State Exploded” in the list of installed maps in Report Builder 3.0 – part of the spatial offering of SQL Server Reporting Server 2008 R2. Alas, it just means that Read More... Posted Tuesday, April 13, 2010 10:06 AM by Rob Farley | 4 Comments

• My new laptop - with a really nice battery option

  It was about time I got a new laptop, and so I made a phone-call to Dell to discuss my options. I decided not to get an SSD from them, because I’d rather choose one myself – the sales guy tells me that changing the HD doesn’t void my warranty, so that’s Read More... Posted Friday, April 09, 2010 1:26 AM by Rob Farley | 9 Comments Filed under: hardware