I read a few articles over the weekend and learnt a few things that I think might be worth bringing to folks’ attention. ODBC Administrator gets a lick of paint in Windows 8/Windows server 2012 The ODBC Administrator in Windows 8 has had some minor improvements. There’s now no longer a 32bit & a 64bit version of it, there’s only one and it ...

SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) is released on a very regular cadence (note that I’m talking about the database projects part of SSDT, this is nothing to do with SSIS/SSAS/SSRS). Since the first release in March 2012 there have been releases in September 2012, November 2012, & December 2012. I personally have found it difficult to keep track of ...

In my August 2009 blog post Exploring Composable DML I introduced a new feature in SQL Server 2008 called Composable DML and also outlined one of its limitations; namely that data from the OUTPUT cannot be aggregated prior to insertion. Composable DML does have some useful scenarios however and one of those is in capturing and storing values that ...

Three days ago at my current gig we stumbled across a problem where use of the NOEXPAND query hint was causing different results compared to the same query without NOEXPAND. For those that do not know (which, until three days ago, included me) NOEXPAND governs the use of indexed views: The indexed view is not expanded only if the view is ...

I recently posted a blog entry on how cloud computing would change the Systems Architect’s role in an organization. In a way, the Systems Architect has the easiest transition to a new way of using computing technologies. In fact, that’s actually part of the job description. I mentioned that a Systems Architect has three primary ...

My recent article Get to Know SQL Server 2012's SQL Server Data Tools prompted two questions to come to me via email and in the interests of sharing knowledge via search engines I thought I would answer them here rather than by simply replying by email (I hate that so much useful information gets trapped inside closed inboxes). Question: How ...

I recently wrote an article on SQL Server Data Tools for SQL Server Magazine and it has now been published online at Get to Know SQL Server 2012's SQL Server Data Tools. In the article I offer my thoughts and opinions on SQL Server Data Tools as it exists in SQL Server 2012. Note that the article refers to SSDT database projects only, there ...

One of the use-cases for a cloud solution is to serve as a Disaster Recovery option for your on-premises servers. I’ll explain one particular use-case in this entry, specifically using Windows Azure “IaaS” or Virtual Machines as a Recovery Solution for SQL Server (more detail here: ...

In SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) one way to create a new object is to right click on a folder in Solution Explorer and point to Add. Doing so will display this menu: A number of options are offered for creating a brand new object (“function”, “table”, “stored proc” etc…) and one of them is “Script”. If your preference is to handcraft the DDL ...

I have stumbled across a nuance of SSDT that other users should be cognizant of. I published an SSDT database project onto an existing database that already had data in it but that Publish operation failed: The error message was: (10036,1): SQL72014: .Net SqlClient Data Provider: Msg 547, Level 16, State 0, Line 1 The ALTER TABLE ...