Thanks to everyone who attended my ''Sell Yourself!'' presentation at SQLSaturday #61 in Washington, D.C., and thanks to NOVA SQL for setting up the event! I'm uploading the presentation deck here in PDF, original length, with new materials (I had to cut some slides out due to time limits).  This deck includes a new section on ...

Invitation for T-SQL Tuesday #006:  ''What About BLOB?''   It's getting warm outside just in time for the May T-SQL Tuesday blog party.  I’ll be your host this month--and the secret word for this T-SQL Tuesday is ''Large Object (LOB) Data''.       What’s T-SQL Tuesday?   About 6 months ago Adam ...

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 ...

A common question on the newsgroups is ''how do you encrypt data in a .NET [or other] client application and then decrypt it on SQL Server [or vice versa]?'' I actually ran down my list of answers to someone who asked this in the newsgroups a few weeks ago. I won’t get into the details, but the answers all pretty much say the same thing -- ...

Back in January 2007, SQL guru Itzik Ben-Gan posted a series of MS Connect enhancement requests concerning windowing function enhancements.  Those who have used the ROW_NUMBER(), RANK(), DENSE_RANK(), and NTILE() functions on SQL 2005 and 2008, you already know how useful they are.  They simplify code and can improve performance ...

It's well-known by now that SQL Server 2005 and 2008 include new encryption-related statements that allow you to create and administer encryption keys. You can use CREATE CERTIFICATE to create or import a certificate or DROP ASYMMETRIC KEY to remove an asymmetric key from the database, for instance.  One of the interesting ommissions ...

During the XML Optimization presentation today I'll refer back to the sample code posted at http://www.apress.com/book/downloadfile/4021.  I'll also update this post with additional sample code by tomorrow. UPDATE: The PowerPoint presentation and sample code are attached to this post in the ZIP file. Jacob Sebastian's book ''The Art of ...

In response to a challenge from Pinal Dave, a fellow MVP and a winner of an award for his blog at the MVP Summit 2009, I am writing a couple of articles to demonstrate practical uses for SQL Server’s XML capabilities.  (Dave’s great blog is at http://blog.sqlauthority.com/). Dave posted the first post in this series over at ...

I don't know if I should laugh or cry after looking at this code. This could not have been written by a human right? Anyway here it is, consider it a teaser. If you want to torture yourself and look at the whole query then go here: http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1421304&page=1   HAVING (((1 = 1)AND (PP.Created >= ...