Consultant & Trainer for all things MSSQL
I love Full text search in MS SQL Server. Although I haven’t seen it being used a lot in client locations, I do use it a lot within my own company as well as for some of my clients who have very specific requirements. One of the more common requirements we find is document search….
Recently I was having a discussion about how coding and design patterns have changed in RDMBS and if we can still call it RDBMS anymore. Very early in my career while attending an interview I was asked what a relational database is, my answer was “anything that stored data in a row and column format…
I was inspired by a recent article I read on parameter sniffing to add my own contribution to the topic, I explain how tempdb spools occur due to poor memory grants and they impact of parameter values in determining how much resources are allocated. I then go on to cover two different ways that the…
Recently there was a post on DB mirroring not working on a VM, in the post I had suggested checking the network connectivity and NIC configurations in the VM software since there are different ways that the VM software assigns IP to the Virtual devices. For the purpose of this post I am using VMware…
Yesterday I got a call from a client about MSDB being suspect after a drive failure. Unfortunately the client didn’t have any backups. Now the correct and best option is to use a backup and restore the database. This way you don’t lose any of the jobs and other configurations that you may have set…
After working with PHI for many years now, I can appreciate the importance of data masking. While normally the first approach is to encrypt the data it is often too much security for the purpose of preventing unauthorized access. Often I have had to sign very complicated NDAs just to ensure that I don’t access…
If you have been following the buzz around MS SQL 2016 you would surely have heard of Stretch database. The concept is interesting and new and probably something we could have used even in SQL 2014. I know a few clients already using Azure data sync to move historical data to the cloud I can’t…
War is an ugly topic, but I wanted to know if we have learnt anything from history and so I downloaded the data for all the wars since 1900 till date to get an understanding of how things have changed. The below chart shows the duration in years on the x axis and the count…
Recently at a training I was asked how to combine the results from two different datasets, while I have used this function before I couldn’t recollect how much of a performance difference it made to look up within SSRS vs performing the join directly with the dataset query. In this blog I try to find…