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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Someone posted a question to the SQL Server forum the other day asking how to count runs of zero bits in an integer using SQL.  Basically the poster wanted to know how to efficiently determine the longest contiguous string of zero-bits (known as a run of bits) in any given 32-bit integer.  Here are a couple ...

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 ...