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I recently inherited some SQL that someone else had written and had the job of “tidying it up” before it gets pushed out to production. Here’s a slightly simplified (yes, simplified) version of that SQL: 1: --options 2: select asset_class 3: , case when volume > 0 then 'profit' 4: ...

UPDATE FROM is dead … or it should be. Hugo Kornelis has done a good job of explaining why. Apart from a badly thought out and non-portable syntax, UPDATE FROM suffers a notorious bug/feature. I say “notorious” but it’s probably not notorious enough because it is still common to see people get tripped up by it. If I write: UPDATE Alpha SET z ...

Of late one may have noticed that I have become very interested in high-brow, generally vaporous, disciplines such as RESTful data services, data interoperability and cloud computing whilst coincident with that has been the inexorable rise of the term “mashup” in the information technology lexicon. “Mashup” means different things to different ...

This is a Public Service Announcement.  Attunity makers of all things connect-y for SSIS are putting on a webinar for their latest product Oracle CDC for SSIS. It’s an enabling solution that accelerates the development of real time data integration with Oracle systems. The event is to be held online on Monday, June 22, 2009 10:00 AM - ...

A couple of years ago I worked on an issue with my colleague Steve Wright about an issue with merge replication.  You can read Steve’s original post here.  However, in summary, the issue boiled down to a security check that merge replication was performing in a generated view called ...

I’ve noticed some confusion in the community over the mythical “4000 character limit” in SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and thought it may be worth clarifying the situation. The most common misconception I hear is “A SSIS string variable has a maximum length of 4000 characters”. This isn’t true and its easy to prove; simply create a ...

Jamie and I gave presentations last night at the London SQL Server users group.  It was a good evening but I think I managed to upset about half the people there.  I suppose when your first two slides are these… …then you can expect a bit of an uphill battle. But, the other half seemed to enjoy it, and besides, if I am not pissing ...

This evening I took over the running of the London SQL Server User Group because the usual hosts, Simon Sabin and James Rowland-Jones, were otherwise occupied. The theme of the night was “SQL Server in the cloud” so I did a session called “What’s new in SQL Data Services” which was a run through of the slides from Nigel Ellis’ session of the same ...

On Thursday this week Jamie Thomson (of SSIS Junkie fame) and I will be presenting at the London SQL Server User Group which will be held at Microsoft’s offices in Cardinal Place and you can still register for the event online.  The pre-planned topic is ‘SQL Server in the Cloud’ and JRJ, who normally organizes the event, is out of town – so ...

Applications hosted on Windows Azure will create log files and given that we don’t have access to the running app instances the log files are the only means available to us for debugging and problem resolution so they’re a very important part of the whole service. Recently I wanted to take a look at the log files for my Tweetpoll Azure application ...