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 ...

Thanks to the Philly SQL Server User Group (PSSUG) and to everyone who attended SQLSaturday #69 in the City of Brotherly Love yesterday. It was a great event with a lot of great people. My presentations are available for download at the links ...

This year's Christmas Card is similar to last year's.  I used the geometry data type again for a spatial data design.  Just download the attachment, unzip the .SQL script and run it in SSMS.  Then look at the Spatial Data preview tab for the result. Also don't forget to visit http://www.noradsanta.org/ if your kids want to ...

I'm really interested in politics (don't worry, I'm not going to start bashing politicians and hammering you with political rage).  The point is when the U.S. FY11 Omnibus Spending Bill (the bill to fund the U.S. Government for another year) was announced it piqued my interest.  I'm fascinated by ''earmarks'' (also ...

The Try-N-Save SSIS Packages from my SSIS Dimensional Data Optimization presentation are available at http://cid-8f7e6c950afc6b3e.office.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/Presentation/TryNSave.zip. I'm still working on getting the sample database uploaded - even compressed a backup is larger than SkyDrive's upload filesize limit. I'll script it out when ...

Just finished giving the SSIS High-Performance Dimensional Data Load presentation at SQLSaturday #59 NYC.  Here are the slides in PDF format.  I'll upload the Try-N-Save code and sample data later for attendees to play with. Thanks to everyone who attended my session and thanks to Melissa D. and NJSQL for putting this ...

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 ...

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday post is about LOB data http://sqlblog.com/blogs/michael_coles/archive/2010/05/03/t-sql-tuesday-006-what-about-blob.aspx.   For this one I decided to post a sample Tiger/Line SQL database I use all the time in live demos. For those who aren't familiar with it, Tiger/Line data is a dataset published by the U.S. ...