Reigniting the [SCDEndDate] debate In November 2009 I wrote a blog post entitled Debunking Kimball Effective Dates where I stated that I was against the Kimball-recommended practice of maintaining a StartDate & EndDate value for every record in a type 2 slowly changing dimension (SCD) table (i.e. the values highlighted in blue in the ...

I have written a few blogs lately explaining how my current project is employing the use of datadude (aka the database development tools in Visual Studio 2010) in order to manage our database code, deployment of that code and also testing of it. In this blog post I’m going to share a little technique that we use in order to store a version history ...

Today I’ve found with my Italian collegues a “nice” bug that made us and the customer mad for several hours. The problem is related to sp_rename usage and sp_refreshview. If you have a view like this one create view dbo.a as select c = 1 go and for any reason someone renames it (for example because he wants to change the view but don’t ...

I’ve always found that understanding the SQL security model can be a finicky affair; that’s no criticism, its more to do with my reluctance to actually spend time immersing myself in it – I generally know what I need to know and that’s all. I remember back when I was first learning T-SQL I found the whole area of security around dynamic SQL ...

As SQL professionals I’m sure many of you build up a library of SQL scripts that you take from project to project, right? Here’s a tip for those of you that have such a collection and want to make sure that you always have ready access to it. I’m a big fan of all things sync-related and there are many tools on the market now that will sync the ...

On nearly every project I ever work on I end up crafting a query that tells me all the information about the indexes in a database. I do of course keep a collection of useful scripts hanging around though when I’m on client site its not always accessible and given how often I end up writing this damn thing I figured I’d just make it easy on myself ...

Someone contacted me yesterday and said they were getting blocked when they tried to create a FileStream data column type. On investigation, I found they were Mirroring that database – and the two aren’t compatible. Which got me to thinking – it’s probably a good idea to make a “check script” as you investigate tacking on a new feature, column ...

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 ...

I'm working on a PowerShell script to show me the trending durations of my backup activities. The first thing I need is the data, so I looked at the Standard Reports in SQL Server Management Studio, and found a report that suited my needs, so I pulled out the script that it runs and modified it to this T-SQL Script. A few words here - you need ...

I’m writing a series of articles on how to migrate “departmental” data into SQL Server. I also hold workshops on the entire process – from discovering that the data exists to the modeling process and then how to design the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) process. Finally I write about (and teach) a few methods on actually moving the data. One ...