It’s common to see a client application referencing the hostname of a SQL Server instance in its connection string. For instance, assume that you have a server whose hostname is NYCSQL01, and you install a default SQL Server instance on it. Naturally, you can connect to the SQL Server instance as NYCSQL01, and that’s the name you give to your ...

In SQL Server, it is rather handy to retrieve data from a different SQL Server instance and use the result locally in another SQL statement for further processing. In theory and in the set purists’ fantasy land, it shouldn’t matter where you get your data or even how you get the data as long as you can use them to further compose a set-based ...

Is it better to move data to procedures or move procedures to data?   The answer is, of course, “it depends.” Let’s consider a scenario where you have two SQL Server instances: ServerA and ServerB, and you have a procedure on ServerB (call it procB), but need to access data on ServerA.   Three database solutions are ...

Aaron Bertrand has been writing an excellent series about Bad habits to kick, highlighting some of the bad practices, primarily, in the areas of T-SQL coding. I’m going to steal his idea and comment on the bad practices I have seen in managing databases.   If we are going to play a phrase association game, the first thing that comes to mind ...