blogs.conchango.com

Crikey.  That title sounds like an essay I had to write when I was at school and that was a long time ago... Jamie Thomson raised an important point in a comment on a blog I posted yesterday entitled "Getting rid of getdate()".  In it I stated that ISNULL() and COALESCE() are in the same boat as getdate() and ...

Ok I admit - I use it. Pretty much everyone I know uses it and yet I feel dirty when I do.  Why? Well it's not portable SQL and most certainly not ANSI standard.  I need to get the datetime I hear you say.  How do I do this without getdate()?  There is a perfectly good substitute in the form of CURRENT_TIMESTAMP that is ...

A colleague of mine asked for a simple example to get him up and running with the basics of bitmasking.  Since I had gone to the effort to create the example I thought I might as well blog it :o). This example uses the logical AND operator &. First of all you need to define your table.. create table BitmaskDemo (ID int Primary ...

In an earlier post I mentioned the new visualisation functionality for spatial data.  Michael Rys kindly pointed me in the direction of Isaac's blog that has some pictures of the new "Spatial Data" tab and resulting visualisation.  As confirmed in the comments below the blog this is using some of the Dundas controls that ...

I found this new article written by Sachin Rekhi on Database Unit Testing with Team Edition for Database Professionals. I think it's an excellent read.  The only thing I don't think it covers is what is not included in the product.  The most notable piece of Team System Unit Testing functionality that isn't included with DB Pro is Code ...

I recently put up a post with a unit test for check constraints validating all were defined with the NOT FOR REPLICATION option.  I thought it might be helpful to put up a post with tests for all the other object types that can have this option set. select object_id,name,is_not_for_replication from sys.foreign_keys where ...

Recently I had a need to create some unit tests for a change to the database that was under development.  I needed to change the database so that the NOT FOR REPLICATION option was set on all keys, constraints, indexes and triggers.  Following an agile engineering best practice I created a schema unit test for ...