GOTO and T-SQL
Today we have a guest editorial from Phil Factor as Steve is on vacation. This piece looks at the complaints against GOTO and whether they are valid.
2011-12-22
868 reads
Phil Factor
- Interests: Motorbikes, Beer, gardening, conservation, Local history.
Little Love Lost for SMO
SMO is a very useful way of automating a wide range of routine database jobs, but Phil Factor laments Microsoft's apparent ambivalence towards the technology, including a lack of anything remotely resembling adequate documentation.
2011-11-28
205 reads
Don't Criticize Code
For anyone eager for a long-term career in IT Development, humility and tact are probably more important habits to acquire than demon coding-skills. Phil Factor explains why.
2011-11-14
317 reads
Never offend a captive audience
Write what you choose to when the reader can, in turn, choose not to read your work; but when you are writing about Technology, you have a captive audience. They need to read your work to keep abreast of the technology. Don't gratuitously offend them. It is not the action of a gentleman, D____it!
2011-11-07
119 reads
Function to Expand Tab Characters
A function to replace tab characters with the correct number of spaces to align the text as originally intended.
2011-09-29 (first published: 2007-10-11)
2,213 reads
Roman Numerals to integers, and Vice Versa, in SQL:
Here are a couple of functions to convert between roman numerals and integers. They are handy for all sorts of...
2011-09-20
21,216 reads
Now you ODBC me now you don't
Phil Factor reflects on Microsoft's "handbrake turn" on OLE DB; Denali's successor will have to have all this plumbing ripped out to replace it with the older ODBC technology. It's a surprising move but makes a lot of sense, given the ubiquity of ODBC drivers for relational data access.
2011-09-12
286 reads
Piracy and Agile
Do Agile IT projects have anything to learn from the organizational structures and laws used by pirates? Phil Factor is not convinced.
2011-09-05
119 reads
Brute-force searching for data.
Today, I needed a way of searching through a database, any database, looking for a certain string. The procedure I...
2011-07-08
3,810 reads
Belt and braces
A moment ago, I was deep in some coding. What it was is not entirely relevant, With a page-full of...
2011-06-30
2,588 reads
Blogs
A New Word: on tenderhooks
By Steve Jones
on tenderhooks – adj. feeling the primal satisfaction of being needed by someone, which...
Ramblings about data communities and your contributions, no excuses
By DataOnWheels
I have been active in the data community throughout my career. I have met...
SQL Server Journey till 2025 (brief)
By Vinay Thakur
Quick Summary for Microsoft SQL Server till 2025, I am fortunate to be part...
Forums
Ola Hallengren Index Optimize Maintenance can we have data compression = page
I have a quick question on Ola Hallengren Index Optimize Maintenance . Do we...
how do i map the "current" object entry in for each to one variable
hi, in an ssis for each loop over an object variable called MyListVariable, i...
Simulating Mercury’s Orbital Motion Using Pure T-SQL (NASA 2025 Dataset)
SQL Server is typically viewed as a transactional or analytical database engine. However, it...
Question of the Day
String Similarity I
On SQL Server 2025, when I run this, what is returned?
SELECT EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY('SQL Server', 'MySQL') See possible answers