I’ve been a little “preachy” lately, telling you that you should let people finish their sentences, and always check a problem out before you tell a user that their issue is “impossible”. Well, I’ll round that out with one more tip today. Keep in mind that all of these things are actions I’ve been guilty of, hopefully in the past. I’m kind of a ...

I’m a big fan of code that writes code – most of the time. For instance, whenever you use the “templates” feature in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) or the Maintenance Wizard, you’re using code that writes other code. There’s even a trick of writing Transact-SQL (T-SQL) code that in turn creates other code. But there is a class of code ...

OK, there are probably a dozen or more of these kinds of posts, but I’ll dive in anyway. From time to time, people send me e-mails or comments on this blog asking for help. Sometimes it’s on the topic at hand, and other times the topic just jogs their memory about something else. Often I’m happy to help. If I know the answer without doing any ...

You’ve probably seen that commercial where the chewing-gum company van stalks the guy who has been chewing the same piece of gum too long, and they attack him and make him chew another piece. I feel like that with SQL Server 2000. Almost every shop I go into has at least one primary application running on SQL Server 2000. Now, don’t get me wrong ...

Last week I ran into an argument I’ve had since I left the mainframe space decades ago. A developer told me “DBA’s don’t design databases.” The inference was that DBA’s (i.e., Database Administrators) only worry about hardware, security, OS, database backups, things like that. He seemed amazed that a DBA would ever do “data” work. It may be the ...