I recently had a task to perform a bulk migration of hundreds of databases to Windows Azure SQL Database (formerly known as SQL Azure) from an instance of SQL Server 2012. If you need to migrate a very small number of databases, the easiest way is likely through the SSMS export Data-Tier Application...

As a follow up to my series on complex test databases , this article will cover one of the more interesting test databases that I recently created. Goal : Create a database that includes one table for each supported collation. Each table contains a single column with the various column level collations...

Introduction: As part of the blog series TSQL - Solve it YOUR Way , today's topic will cover a question asked recently in the T-SQL MSDN forums where the solution, at first, seems extremely obvious. However, as solutions were proposed and flaws were discovered with the proposals, the interesting nature...

Introduction: As part of the blog series TSQL - Solve it YOUR Way , today we will tackle a numeric parsing question. While past topics include solutions that vary from 15-150 lines of TSQL code, all of today's solutions will be very short. A question was recently posted in the MSDN forums asking how...

Introduction: As part of the blog series TSQL - Solve it YOUR Way , today's topic will cover a common programming interview question where we are asked to find the longest repeated substring in a given string, followed by different solutions and explanations from three of the more helpful and creative...

Introduction: As part of the blog series TSQL - Solve it YOUR Way , today's topic will cover a question asked in the Transact-SQL MSDN Forums here , followed by three different solutions from three of the more helpful and creative contributors in the TSQL MSDN forums, Jens Suessmeyer, Naomi Nosonovsky...

Introduction: As part of the blog series TSQL - Solve it YOUR Way , today's topic will cover a question recently asked in the Transact-SQL MSDN Forums here , followed by four different solutions from three of the more helpful and creative contributors in the TSQL MSDN forums, Jingyang Li, Steven Wang...

Introduction: As part of the blog series TSQL - Solve it YOUR Way , today's topic is a variation of the popular T-SQL question titled "Gaps and Islands" followed by three different solutions presented by three of the more helpful and creative contributors in the TSQL MSDN forums, Steven Wang, Alejandro...

Introduction: As part of the blog series TSQL - Solve it YOUR Way , I will present a topic recently discussed in the Transact-SQL MSDN forum here , followed by three different solutions to this problem supplied by three of the most active and helpful contributors in the forums, Tom Cooper, Naomi Nosonovsky...

For many years, I have been an active contributor to the MSDN Forums, including one of my favorite forums, Transact-SQL . Besides the obvious benefit of helping customers solve their current SQL challenges, with each answer I provide I expand my knowledge and understanding of SQL Server. Inevitably,...

The AdventureWorks database is a fictitious company database that has existed since SQL Server 2005 as a means to show new functionality in each new version released. Because the Books Online TSQL samples leverage this sample database, AdventureWorks has become a vital aspect of learning new features...

As part of my series on creating databases with interesting characteristics for testing purposes , I have covered a few different engine constructs, test strategies, and scripting techniques to build interesting databases. In this article, I am going to highlight one technique I use fairly often with...

As part of my series on creating databases with interesting characteristics for testing purposes , today we'll cover a question that was asked in the SQL Server MSDN forums regarding column limits. The question is "What is the true column limit in SQL Server?" From a testing perspective, one of...

Over the past week, I've written a few entries regarding complex databases with interesting characteristics for testing purposes. Creating Complex Test Databases - Intro Creating Complex Test Databases - Creating a Database with 1 Billion Random Rows Creating Complex Test Databases - Generating...

As part of my series on creating databases with interesting characteristics for testing purposes , today we'll leverage the internal SQL Server system tables to create a table containing columns of each nullable and non-nullable data types supported by SQL Server. Goal: Create a table that contains...

As part of my series on creating databases with interesting characteristics for testing purposes , today we'll create a database containing a large number of tables, each with a large number of rows inserted. Goal: Create a database with ONE BILLION ROWS. The database should contain 1,000 tables with...

As a very brief intro, I have worked as a tester in SQL Server for the past 10+ years on many different features. Along the way, we develop and test features and release them to the public only to discover some customers inevitably encounter bugs when they run the features against their databases. How...