Conversation History: The Continuing Case Against GUIDs

We had a cooperative relational database design exercise at the office last week as part of our regular department "Lunch...

YYYYMM Math

I had a project recently where I had to do math on a number that represented a date, YYYYMM.

For example,...

"An item with the same key has already been added."

In SQL Server Reporting Services, when adding a new dataset to a report, you may see an error that looks...

Script Out Foreign Keys With Multiple Keys

It's easy enough to use sys.foreign_keys and sys.foreign_key_columns to identify foreign keys.  But what if you want to script out your foreign...

Using Foreign Keys to Determine Table Insertion Order

Here's a script to determine, based on your database's foreign key relationships, what the insertion order would be for, say,...

Adding the Clustered Key To Your Nonclustered Index? Part 2

Of course, a rather obvious answer presents itself the next day.  After reviewing the actual environment that my colleague was...

Adding the Clustered Key To Your Nonclustered Index?

A colleague of mine was understandably confused when using the almost-perfect missing index engine in SQL 2008. The engine recommended he include...

Try a Database Design Exercise At Your Next SQL User Group

Tried something different for the January 2013 meeting of the Baton Rouge SQL Server User Group (brssug.org), which meets every...

Management Studio Database Diagram Owners

If you're working in an environment as a developer without sysadmin privileges, and you are creating database diagrams using Management Studio...

On the Advantages of DateTime2(n) over DateTime

Starting with SQL 2008, we database developers started becoming more familiar with datetime2.  Sometimes folks need convincing though, so here...