January 2011 - Posts

• SSMS hanging without error when connecting to SQL

  Scary day for me last Thursday. I had gone up to Brisbane, and was due to speak at the Queensland SQL User Group on Thursday night . Unfortunately, disaster struck about an hour beforehand. Nothing to do with the recent floods (although we were meeting Read More... Posted Monday, January 31, 2011 2:35 PM by Rob Farley | 0 Comments Filed under: sql

• 24 Hours of PASS scheduling

  I have a new appreciation for Tom LaRock ( @sqlrockstar ), who is doing a tremendous job leading the organising committee for the 24 Hours of PASS event (Twitter: #24hop ). We’ve just been going through the list of speakers and their preferences for time Read More... Posted Wednesday, January 26, 2011 1:44 PM by Rob Farley | 6 Comments Filed under: 24hop, community, sqlpass

• On technical talent

  In honour of the regular T-SQL Tuesday blogging, the UnSQL theme started, looking at topics that were not directly SQL related, but nevertheless quite interesting. This is the brainchild of Jen McCown, who posted the second of these recently. I’m actually Read More... Posted Tuesday, January 25, 2011 3:15 PM by Rob Farley | 0 Comments Filed under: lobsterpot, unsql

• When a problem is resolved

  This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Jen McCown, and she’s picked the topic of Resolutions . It’s a new year, and she’s thinking about what people have resolved to do this year. Unfortunately, I’ve never really done resolutions like that. I see too Read More... Posted Tuesday, January 11, 2011 11:49 AM by Rob Farley | 3 Comments Filed under: t-sql tuesday

• Visually stunning maps and PivotViewer

  One of the things about PivotViewer is that it runs in the Silverlight platform and can be extended recently. One of my guys at LobsterPot , Roger Noble , has used this to incorporate a Bing Maps layer , showing items which have  Latitude and Longitude Read More... Posted Tuesday, January 04, 2011 3:43 PM by Rob Farley | 5 Comments Filed under: pivotviewer, spatial

• Using SQL Execution Plans to discover the Swedish alphabet

  SQL Server is quite remarkable in a bunch of ways. In this post, I’m using the way that the Query Optimizer handles LIKE to keep it SARGable, the Execution Plans that result, Collations, and PowerShell to come up with the Swedish alphabet. SARGability Read More... Posted Monday, January 03, 2011 4:54 PM by Rob Farley | 5 Comments Filed under: collation, indexing, powershell, sql, sqlbits, sqlpass