Posts filed under: sql server
SQL Management Studio 17.1
Starting in 2016 SQL Server Management Studio got its own team at Microsoft and after many years of very little improvement we are starting to see some pretty consistent releases. They just recently released SSMS 17.1. It is compatible...
Connecting to a Pre-SQL 2012 SSIS Instance with SQL 2012 SSMS
I was recently trying to do some development work with SSIS. I had SQL 2012 installed on a development VM and had issues connecting to an SSIS 2008 R2 instance on a different server. You can either install multiple versions...
Andy Null and Data Cleansing Fun
Have you ever thought of changing your name to “Blank Null”? Would you still have to pay taxes? Could you even get a job? How many report writers and ETL cleansers would classify you as bad data and toss you...
SQL Server 2017
Well it seems like just yesterday (well maybe a year ago) that we were talking about SQL 2016. With Microsoft’s Azure first strategy it seems that we may be back to more frequent releases than every 2 years for on-premise...
SSMS 2017 CTP2 is not compatible with VS 2013
If you were like me and wanted to get SSMS 2016 to connect to later versions of SQL server or Azure you probably went to the SSMS 2016 page to get it. However, the download package they actually give you...
When is Select * ok
Generally speaking SELECT * should be avoided. There are multiple reasons for this, including: Requesting columns you do not need may force the optimizer to use more objects than needed or pull more data to memory than needed. Save some...
Optimization Smarts! Join Simplification
Someone recently read a post by Erik Darling over at BrentOzar.com titled Is it ever worth adding indexes to table variables. They were a little confused by the post and asked me about it. I thought I would break it...
Idempotent statements
Idempotent statements are those where applying the statement multiple times yields the same result. Commonly in database development this is significant during deployment activities. If we create a new table the deployment script will merely have the CREATE TABLE syntax....
SSIS Package Parts First Impressions
Reading the way package parts were described in the SQL 2016 release notes I was pretty excited. I remember having hundreds of SSIS packages where the overall structure was fairly redundant, this was before BIML was a thing, and package...
Planning Upgrades, Migrations, Consolidations.. SQL and more
Steve Jones posted a good editorial a month or so ago about why he typically prefers side-by-side migrations over in-place upgrades. If you are running virtualized and want to upgrade in-place then it is not horrendous if you need to revert back...