Tony Davis

  • Interests: football, modern literature, real ale

SQLServerCentral Editorial

The Wild Fringes of SQL Server Development

We can now clearly see two opposing trends in the way SQL Server is being used in applications. The dumb database brigade regards SQL Server as simply a 'data dump'. The 'database fanatics' think SQL Server on its own can meet the needs of all but the most demanding applications. Can these opposing trends be reconciled? Tony Davis would like to think so.

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2008-12-01

227 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Barriers to Entry, Database Weekly (Oct 27 2008)

Many people who spend time contributing to technical forums bemoan the increasing amount of time and energy they expend trying to help people who seem unwilling or unable to help themselves. At the same time, they say, the courtesy is deteriorating and the number of people willing to "stir things up" for the sake of it increases. Is there a solution to this?

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2008-10-27

109 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Dataphor

Over the years, there have been several attempts to turn conventional RDBMSs into object relational databases, by inserting an intermediate layer. The driving force behind this was the generally-held assumption that the relational model could not handle complex data types.

(1)

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2008-06-24

289 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Rules, Defaults and the SQL Standard

I see, with some relief that the threatened removal of Rules and Defaults in SQL Server 2008 hasn’t happened. There has been a stay of execution. Even though they are documented, they still come with a dire warning that they are deprecated and will be removed in future versions. They have fallen foul of the SQL Standards committee, and we are now supposed to use check constraints instead.

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2008-06-23

180 reads

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Open Source and SQL Server communities

The other day, I was chatting to a keen PostgreSQL user. We're used to having free databases, such as IBM DB2 Express-C, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, SQLite and Oracle XE, but PostgreSQL is different in that it is open source. It is a proper, dedicated community too, I was told...

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2008-06-09

118 reads

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Question of the Day

Fun with JSON I

I have some data in a table:

CREATE TABLE #test_data
(
    id INT PRIMARY KEY,
    name VARCHAR(100),
    birth_date DATE
);

-- Step 2: Insert rows  
INSERT INTO #test_data
VALUES
(1, 'Olivia', '2025-01-05'),
(2, 'Emma', '2025-03-02'),
(3, 'Liam', '2025-11-15'),
(4, 'Noah', '2025-12-22');
If I run this query, how many rows are returned?
SELECT *
FROM OPENJSON(
     (
         SELECT t.* FROM #test_data AS t FOR JSON PATH
     )
             ) t;

See possible answers