I recently returned to a client at which I last worked back in 2006 and, as you might imagine, that gives me ample material for a blog post dedicated to Crap Code; conveniently the subject of the latest T-SQL Tuesday. I first worked for this client back in 2004 and that is significant because back then we were writing code on SQL Server 2000. Ah, ...

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. ...

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 ...

Ahhh, attention to detail. I misread Adam's T-SQL Tuesday rules and posted early. So here I go again :) This time the puzzle is how to add and update metadata via extended properties in the database with minimal headaches. SQL Server supports a great feature for storing database object metadata in the database in the form ...

One of the most commonly used data types in SQL Server is [datetime] which unfortunately has some vagaries around how values get casted. A typical method for defining a [datetime] literal is to write it as a character string and then cast it appropriately. The cast syntax looks something like this: DECLARE @dt ...