February '14 Acadiana SQL Server User Group

I am honored to be the very first presenter of the new PASS chapter in Lafayette, Louisiana this Tuesday, presenting...

February '14 Data Architecture Virtual Chapter Meeting

I will be speaking and whiteboarding for Data Architecture Virtual Chapter meeting on February 27, 2014 on the fitting topic...

Actual Emails: More Grief for GUIDs

Wrote this email exchange with some developer colleagues about to embark on performance tuning.
Subject: bag o' tricks from DMV talk
From: A. Developer
Hey...

It May Be Necessary Re-enable Service Broker After Baremetal Restore

After the restore of a database, or perhaps a bare-metal restore of a Windows server running SQL Server, unique IDs...

Start/Stop Group of Azure VM's

If you've already configured your local machine's PowerShell environment to interact with your Azure subscription (see here: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/articles/install-configure-powershell/), then you can...

Easy Backup History Review Script

I often use these scripts to check on the backups of all databases in an unfamiliar SQL Server instance, regardless...

Not Dead Yet - Text and NText in SQL 2014

I was recently approached by a client who was running SQL Server 2008 with some databases in SQL 2000 compatibility...

Don't Hitch Your Wagon To MS Access

I know this might seem like an odd topic on a SQL Server blog, but it's a common and critical...

Case-Sensitive Updates in a Case-Insensitive World

Assuming you're in a case-insensitive ("CI" in the collation name) column, this UPDATE statement:

UPDATE tablefoo
set foo = 'Z'
where foo = 'z'

will just...

It's Dangerous to ISNUMERIC, Take This Try_Convert

There's an issue with some characters in T-SQL when validating numeric values out of raw varchar fields, and it can...