Just a reminder that I will be speaking at the SF UG SQL Server User Group on Sep 12.  Here is a link with all of the details.  If you are in the area, It would be great to see you!

Recently, I've been speaking with customers about upgrading SQL Server.  At times, some customers have a lot of Standard Edition  SQL Server 2005 / 2008 / 2008R2 in their organization and they want to see the features they get when upgrading to SQL Server 2012.  Last week, I sent out some tweets to the #sqlhelp hashtag to see if ...

SQLTeach (Part of the DevTeach Conferences in Canada) has enjoyed success for many years.  I enjoyed the opportunity to speak at and attend SQLTeach at various times over the years.  Since SQLTeach is part of DevTeach, the ''feel'' of the event is very different from PASS or SQLRally or even a SQL Saturday where SQL is the primary ...

We all know that dynamic SQL runs in its own scope (see here for details), and that if used improperly it can have serious security implications.  But it's also important to realize that dynamic SQL evaluates your SQL statements more like a stored procedure than a regular script.  In stored procedures, if the tables you reference ...

Margarity Kerns recently published a very nice article at SQL Server Central on using hash functions to detect changes in rows during the data warehouse load ETL process.  On the discussion page for the article I noticed a lot of the same old arguments against using hash functions to detect change.  After having this same discussion ...

This is my contribution to the T-SQL Tuesday blog party, started by Adam Machanic and  hosted this month by Aaron Nelson.  Aaron announced this month's topic is ''reporting'' so I figured I'd throw a blog up on a reporting topic I've been interested in for a while -- namely creating custom reports in SSMS. Creating SSMS custom ...

Ask about nearly any kind of SQL-based date calculation in the newsgroups, and you'll likely get responses that include use of an auxiliary calendar table.  It's a really good idea, and something I highly recommend to anyone who has to do date-based calculations on the server.  For those who do dimensional modeling, you'll probably ...

Based on feedback from the community (https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/522123/sql-server-2008-service-pack-2 and https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/522122/service-pack-4-for-sql-server-2005), Microsoft has announced plans to release Service Pack 2 for SQL Server 2008 and Service Pack 4 for SQL ...

New Jersey SQL Server User Group (NJSQL) is bringing SQLSaturday #39 to NYC on April 24, 2010!  The free all-day training event will be hosted by Microsoft at their Midtown Manhattan offices.  The speaker line-up is growing fast—if you'd like to present, visit the event's open call for speakers.  This is a free full-day ...

A common question on the newsgroups is ''how do you encrypt data in a .NET [or other] client application and then decrypt it on SQL Server [or vice versa]?'' I actually ran down my list of answers to someone who asked this in the newsgroups a few weeks ago. I won’t get into the details, but the answers all pretty much say the same thing -- ...