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 ...

Many SSIS transformations, such as the Pivot and the Data Profiling Tasks, require that the data being fed into them be sorted. Without first sorting, some transformations will throw an error and not run, while others will run but the results will not be as expected. The answer is to sort the data before it is fed into the transformation; the ...

Well, It’s happened again. Hundreds of thousands of private records were stolen from a database. This one, however, was different. No one stole any passwords, no one did any social engineering, nothing was captured in-line. No, this one was accomplished by stealing the actual hard drives themselves!  When a thief breaks in and steals hard ...

Many shops need to store binary large objects (sometimes called BLOBS) in a database. There are really only two ways to do this: store in them in a table structure in the database itself using a binary data type, or store them in the operating system in a file folder somewhere and point to the file using a text field in a table. Both of these ...

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, ...

As the Data Professional in your organization, the rest of the org looks to you to ensure that the system can handle what the business requires. To do that, you need to know two things: what the business requires, and what SQL Server can do. But of course there’s a bit more to it than that. Knowing the business side of the requirements – well, I ...

On the SQL Server public programming newsgroup someone recently posted a question about an SSMS error (''Cannot parse script. 'System.OutOfMemoryException' thrown.'') I hadn’t encountered this error myself, but the workaround is to break up very large scripts (50+ MB) into smaller scripts. Adam Machanic posted a T-SQL Tuesday challenge to post a ...