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There was some great news this week for SSIS developers that are building solutions involving databases other than SQL Server; Microsoft will, later this year, be releasing new connectors for Oracle, Teradata and SAP BW. Check out Darvey Lavender's announcement on the SSIS connectivity wiki or read Matt Masson's blog entry for more details. I ...

Well David Litchfield thinks so. "Who he?" you ask. Well this article will explain all. Thanks to Dan Jones for the link.   -Jamie  

I spotted this on El Reg earlier on today. Apparently Oracle is going to be sold on a per-socket basis rather than per-core thus aping Microsoft's policy with SQL Server. Seems like a good move for Oracle - it should enable them to compete better with SQL Server, certainly at the lower end of the spectrum anyway. -Jamie  

As part of my current role as a tester I am often required to write the same basic expressions again and again in my queries, most noticeably to bring back data for specific date ranges, therefore for the benefit of anyone else out there who has to do likewise I have detailed below my method for returning the following basic ranges: Daily; Week ...

I regularly need to pass variables into my queries, and when running multiple tests, it helps to have a way to change these variables easily, preferably, without having to go through the query each time and change the sql. Fortunately for me TOAD (Tool for Oracle Application Developers) for Oracle offers a way to do this with bound variables. ...

In one of my frequent trips through Google on the search for how to do something (I forget what it was I was looking for on this particular occasion), I found myself, as I often do, being directing to various contributions from posts on life after coffee.com Whilst the entry it turned out wasn't relevant to what I was searching for, it did ...

Hi, following on from my previous two posts about Analytic Functions, and specifically about the lack of a T-SQL equivalent to the LAG and LEAD functions I demonstrated, there is a SQL Server feedback vote currently active which you can participate in if you are interested in seeing these functions incorporated into a future update. The vote can ...

. . . Or making the complex simpler. Following on from my previous post, Analytic Functions are powerful tools for performing complex operations in a more compact and efficient query, but they are not appropriate for all occassions. They have nuances which require more delicacy than simply using brute querying force to perform a complex task and ...

For any number of reasons which I won’t go into, you may have a need, or desire, to return a value in a query from one row next to a value from another. A typical example might be in a daily sales database, where I want to see yesterday’s total sales against today’s total sales. It is straight forward enough to write the query to ...

I have over the last couple of days been working with Jamie Thomson on a sql query to return a daily value inferred from periodic data readings throughout a month. One of the requirements to creating this query was to generate a list of days in the month. Sounds pretty easy except that we couldn't use procedural logic (such as a cursor), so it ...