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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The script below generates the geekiest Christmas card in the world.  To see it, follow these instructions: (1) Copy and paste the script below into SQL Server Management Studio 2008(2) Execute the script(3) Look at the ''Spatial Results'' tab in SSMS Merry Christmas! -- Begin copy here SELECT ...

Thanks to all those who made the NJSQL Saturday event held in Iselin, NJ today a success! Those lucky enough to attend were given a sneak preview of one of the best young presenters out there--MVP Jacob Sebastian--who will also be speaking at PASS.  I have to hand it to Jacob: he gave one of the best presentations on a SQL Server topic ...