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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 post is my entry for Adam Machanic's T-SQL Tuesday #004, hosted this time by Mike Walsh. I was at the RSA Conference in San Francisco last week discussing database encryption options in SQL Server 2008 and one question seemed to keep coming up. The question concerns FILESTREAM and Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), but first a little ...

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 ...

I'll be presenting at the Northern NJ .NET User Group meeting on Tuesday February 9.  Topics we'll cover include: Intro to SQL Server 2008 Integrated Full-Text Search (iFTS) features and functionality, including: Full-text indexes Thesaurus Word breakers, filters and stemming Multilanguage support Intro to SQL Server 2008 FILESTREAM ...

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 ...

I ran into an issue the other day and I needed a solution for automically configuring my SSIS packages from securely stored DBMS connection strings. Problem is that most DBMSs don’t support Integrated Authentication—they require a username and password. Storing the username/password combo in the connection string in plain text is a security risk, ...