Requirement Some time back I presented a PowerShell script which extracts T-SQL code from RDL files. Remember that I created this script to assist me in doing code reviews of ad-hoc SQL snippets which were embedded in the report definition files. Another...

Over the last year I’ve been fortunate enough to be trained by some top-notch professionals from the world of media and big-stage events on how to deliver world-class sessions – whether it be a multi-day training, a short TechEd session, an online meeting...

One of the things I do in my day job at Microsoft Services is to review database design and T-SQL code. Now, when it comes to code, there is a challenge just to find ALL the possible code which hits our database engine. This is because a non-trivial amount...

Some customers have adopted block level replication of the storage disks (LUNs) as their DR solution for SQL Server databases. Remote mirroring of storage disks sounds great – transparent to the application, replicates every block as-is; so very little...

Scenario Today my customer told me that he is facing an error message ‘Cannot resolve the collation conflict’ when executing an JOIN between two tables: a base table and a temporary table. They had recently created the database afresh from scripts and...

Today there was a question on the #sqlhelp Twitter hashtag: “Is it possible to get UPDATE/SELECT/INSERT/DELETE statement counts from SQL Server?” Implementation This is a perfect use case for the SQLDOM parser a.k.a. Microsoft.SqlServer.TransactSql.ScriptDom...

TechEd 2013 was a grand success! Thank you – those of you who stayed till 6:15PM at the Pune session – and even more to those who engaged me in Q&A till 7PM that evening I was very impressed and happy to see people interested in my talk, even though...

Some of you might be aware of the above namespace , which holds an implementation of a first-class T-SQL parser. In this post I would like to explain some of the complexity you will face when dealing with the ScriptDOM yourselves, typically using Visitor...

Kids in school today are more comfortable working with computers than with pen-and-paper. And for kids with special needs it may actually be the only way for them to express themselves. So I always wondered what we can do to make the learning experience...

In SQL 2000, the kpid column in sysprocesses was a convenient way to find out the actual worker thread ID (OS level thread identifier) for a given task. How does one do this using the DMVs? Here is a quick way: select R.Session_Id, Th.os_thread_id from...

I just delivered a session on ‘T-SQL Horrors: how NOT to code’ at TechEd India. The response has been great, and those of you who see this after attending my session, thank you very much for your interest and participation! What I appreciate the most...

This is a ‘quick-and-not-so-dirty’ version of a T-SQL formatter / ‘pretty printer’ in PowerShell. To use this, please install the SQL 2012 SP1 version of the SQLDOM from the Feature Pack page . (If you already have SQL 2012 client tools on your machine...

Background Constraints in SQL Server are of the following types: CHECK constraints DEFAULT constraints Foreign key constraints NULLable constraint UNIQUE constraint PRIMARY KEY constraint BTW, if you are wondering what a NULLable constraint is, it is...

Firstly - Happy New Year, everyone! In my job as a Principal Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft Services, I am a regional lead for a proactive risk identification program called the SQLRAP. For over 7 years now we have evolved this from a manually conducted...

This one is a quick tip. I recently upgraded to Office 2013 RTM and wanted to use the excellent Power View feature which is now an integral part of Excel! However, after I setup my tables (actually I used the Power Pivot data model) I was consistently...

Something which I have been waiting for a long time has finally been released! The ReportViewer 2012 redistributable RTM package is available for download now! Deployment notes FYI, ReportViewer is used by Management Studio (SSMS), other utilities and...

Background More and more customers are looking to upgrade to SQL Server 2012, which offers some exciting features like AlwaysOn Availability Groups, ColumnStore Indexes and much more. As part of my job in the Microsoft Premier Field Engineering team,...

Background It is a very common requirement in SSIS packages to extract contents of a compressed ZIP file, and then process that file in a data flow. From what I can see, it appears that TaskUnzip is quite a popular way to achieve this. So as part of the...

Background One of my hobbies is following the commercial aviation scene. My job requires me to fly around a lot, and that only sparks my curiosity further around how the commercial aviation business works. What better then, that to use this hobby as...

This post is a really quick one… Let’s say you are planning to check your SQL Server and T-SQL code for any potential breaking changes in SQL 2012. So you use Upgrade Advisor. Let’s say you want to download it, rather than get it from the installation...

Background I have some old VPCs which I used to run on Virtual PC 2007 SP1. In Virtual PC, we used ‘VM Additions’ which would install some drivers to make the VPC run smoothly in the virtualized environment. For example these additions...

  Background A customer asked me a question last week: in CLR-COM interop case, who is responsible to free up a string returned from COM? My understanding was that the interop layer setup by .NET will automatically take care of this. However, I thought...

Yesterday I accidentally stumbled upon a goldmine : the Shared Source CLI 2.0 Internals book! This book covers the Shared Source CLI (if you don’t know what that is, check out the references at the end of this post) from an internals perspective. I find...

This is a quick one: my PFE colleagues Brad Linscott and Mario Hewardt have contributed an excellent video series on Channel 9. Check it out NOW at .NET Debugging for the Production Environment ! Awesome stuff!

Visual Studio can be used to debug processes remotely, using the MSVSMON agent. This can be used for both native code and managed code. However, for successfully debugging managed code applications, symbol files have to be correctly loaded – and...