A small blog post for anyone who stumbles across this issue (and for my future self, should I forget the solution). I was working on some tables in SSDT and I tried to publish changes to the database on my local machine. I got a build error because I created a clustered index on the […]
Tag: sql server
Exporting Environment Variables out of the SSIS Catalog
Sometimes when you’ve created a SSIS catalog, along with folders, environments and environment variables, you want this content on another server. Unfortunately, you can only script out these objects in SSMS at the moment you’re creating them (thus right before you clikc ‘OK’ to confirm). Once the objects are created, you can no longer script […]
Converting a Datetime to UTC
I was in a need of converting some datetime values (of which I know the actual timezone) to UTC dates. A quick Google search showed me that most results on the first page were simply wrong. Most of them used this trick: Seems nifty, but they forgot about daylight savings time. If I run the […]
Optimize for Unknown for Inline Table-Valued Functions
I had a curious performance issue today. An inline table-valued function (iTVF) was performing poorly for some parameter sets, and quite fast for other parameter values. In short, this one is fast: This one is slow: Turns out SQL Server used a plan with a hash join in the fast query, and a nested loop […]
Quickly Editing Data in SSMS
WARNING: do not do this in production. A quick blog post on a SSMS trick: how to quickly edit data. Sometimes you directly want to manipulate data without having to write a SQL statement. For example, in the development environment you want to modify a value in a column to test out a scenario, or […]
Book Review: T-SQL Window Functions by Itzik Ben-Gan
A couple of years back Itzik Ben-Gan (the T-SQL guru) wrote the book Microsoft SQL Server 2012 High-Performance T-SQL Using Window Functions. It’s has been one of my most favorite technical books (I included it in this list): it was really an eye-opener to how useful and powerful window functions can be. It teaches the […]
Restarting SQL Server after adding a new SQL login
At a project, we asked if we could get a SQL Server login/user so we could make a connection from an Apache Airflow pipeline to the SQL Server instance. The answer was: “No, because then we would need to restart the server”. This sounded a bit strange, because I’ve never had to restart the SQL […]
SQL Server Development Best Practices – Webinar
I’m delighted to announce I’ll be giving a webinar for MSSQLTips.com about SQL Server Development Best Practices. Aka writing T-SQL and stuff 🙂 The webcast is the 13th of June 2019 at 7PM UTC. In a nutshell, I’ll be talking about the stuff I would tell my 10-year younger self about T-SQL development (if I […]
Cool Stuff in Snowflake – Part 5: Finding Previous Non Null Value
I’m doing a little series on some of the nice features/capabilities in Snowflake (the cloud data warehouse). In each part, I’ll highlight something that I think it’s interesting enough to share. It might be some SQL function that I’d really like to be in SQL Server, it might be something else. Sometimes you need to find the […]
Cool Stuff in Snowflake – Part 4: Aliasing all the things
I’m doing a little series on some of the nice features/capabilities in Snowflake (the cloud data warehouse). In each part, I’ll highlight something that I think it’s interesting enough to share. It might be some SQL function that I’d really like to be in SQL Server, it might be something else. In this post I’ll talk about […]