SQL Server Blogs

Its been a fair few years since I started blogging on SQLBlogCasts and the time has now come to find a new home. From now on (along with a few others of the UK SQL Server community) I shall be blogging on dataidol.com.  My page will be at http://dataidol.com/davebally , please update any feeds etc and I hope to see you there.

On the weekend of the 9th March 2013, the second SQL Saturday in the UK occurred.  A massive thank you must go to all the sponsors of the event, FusionIO, Confio, Nexus, Purple Frog, Redgate, Idera and Big Bang Data. Additionally big congratulations to Jonathan and Annette Allan, Thomas Rushton and Mark Price-Mayer for putting on such a great ...

Time does fly, and happy birthday SQL Lunch UK. It has been a year since the first SQLLunch UK, and over the year there have been 21 Lunchs with a total of 537 attendees.  OK, some of those will be the same people but in ‘conference speak’ each registration counts, but in any case i’m delighted by the success and looking forward to ...

As ive stated in the past,  i’m presently part of a team on an ALM project for a major UK based online retailer.  The aim of this project is to have fully automated app and database code and schema deployment, through development, UAT and finally live. Most parts of this equation we have pretty much got licked, SSDT is used to generate ...

If you are anything like me, by know you will have a few thousand digital images spread across multiple directories and heaven knows how many of those are duplicates! Here’s a little powershell script I use to try and keep them in order,  it recursively scans a directory (hardcoded to D:\photodrop) and interrogates any .jpg file for its ...

As you may be aware, I have been running a lunch time user group ‘SQLLunch UK’  having stolen drawn inspiration from Patrick Leblanc (t|b) ’s SQLLunch webcasts.  These however are not traditional webcasts, as although we use remote speakers,  to watch you have to get away from your desk for lunch and come down to the venue.  I ...

Late in December, one the long awaited portions of functionality inside SSDT was released to an eager public, that being unit testing.  There has been a lot of noise generated about sql unit testing as a concept recently and hopefully you have decided that that is now the way to go.  Bill Gibson of Microsoft has blogged at quick ...

As I'm sure I must have mentioned in the past, I’m presently involved in a large ALM project at a client.  Part of this project is using Sql Server Data Tools (SSDT) to aid the developer experience and to establish the schema under source control as “The Truth”. SSDT, has the ability to compare a schema under development to a schema on a ...

Many kudos goes to Jonathan and Annette Allen and the others on the team for confirming SQL Saturday 194 in Exeter on the 8th and 9th of March.  The event home page is here http://www.sqlsaturday.com/194/eventhome.aspx and I delighted that myself and Dave Morrison will be presenting a full day pre-con on the 8th on favourite subjects “TSQL ...

As we are all aware, there are a number of traceflags.  Some documented, some semi-documented and some completely undocumented.  Here is one that is undocumented that Paul White(b|t) mentioned almost as an aside in one of his excellent blog posts. Much has been written about residual predicates and how a predicate can be pushed into a ...