From time to time I throw a website together for some temporary purpose. The website collects some data from users and I need to make this data available for whoever I put the site together for. A perfect example of this is a website that I put together for my wife for some craft making event. She needed to allow friends to place orders for various craft activities so she knew what materials she needed to order. She needed to be able to see these orders as they were placed. For a website like t

A co-worker pointed out to me something cool that is coming in SQL 2008. A new keyword for MERGE has been introduced. This new type of statement reduces some of the tedious work you typically do when adding data to a table in SQL. As things are now, you will check for the existence of a row, and then proceed to update the matched row if it exists, or insert the new data if the matching row did not exist. The new MERGE keyword allows you to do this all in a single statement.

I came across this list on CodeProject of SQL Queries to analyze SharePoint details and usage. This is an awesome list. Granted it does bypass the SBS object model so isn't the recommended route, but still a great list of queries you could use to make reporting on your SharePoint sites a breeze

I started this blog in August of 2003, almost 3 years ago. I've made 176 posts in those 3 years. I don't post too often to my blog because I'm not all that big on posting stories about my kids, wife, dog, etc - although those do come in every now and then. Anyway, even when I have lulls where I am not posting as much, my traffic seems to stay pretty consistent. I'm actually amazed at how much traffic I get, especially when I consider how often I get around to posting (big thanks to all the visit

I was playing around with various ways to launch SQL Reporting Services reports and came across a good tip. If you work with SRS then you'll likely know you can launch a report by simply accessing the Uri to the report. However, you can also specify format types to automatically export a report.

I have to say it, I love the new SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS). Wow. There is some really awesome stuff in there that really just blow me away. There are so many new things in SSIS that I just love - too many to mention. However, it is some of the smaller, less noticed, features that have come to be my favorites. Here are my top 3 small features in SSIS (so far).

Not sure why, but I seem to be on a T-SQL kick lately - so here's another T-SQL post. One of my favorite T-SQL hacks ever is one that can flatten out data by taking a value from multiple rows and concatenating the values into a single string.

While we're on the subject of dates in T-SQL, I never liked getting the month and year for a date and sticking an '01' in the middle (then casting it all back to a datetime) to get the first day of the month for a given date value. Then you do the same to get the end date by getting the first day of the next month and subtract a 1 from it. This way is much better.

I was reminded of a SQL function to determine if a date was a weekday or a weekend I wrote a while back when I saw the requirements of a project a colleague was working on. You'll see this requirement fairly often in many business applications. A company might want to span certain activities over business or working days only. The requirement might be to only include business days in certain calculations. Either way, there are a few things to keep in mind when making this calculation.

Tips on allowing inserts to identity columns and also for reseeding the identity value for a table.

I'm in the same boat as Scott Mitchell on this one. I practically live inside of SQL Enterprise Manager. Been using it for years abd years. But I never knew about this.

OK, there is not an Olympics for T-SQL - but there should be. A friend of mine and I were talking the other day about “gold-medal” T-SQL we've come accross. The one that wins the gold for me is the code I found a long time ago on SQL Server Central from Masar Ivica that creates a PDF file from scratch in a stored procedure. No external tools used. No PDF libraries or anything, just good old T-SQL (plus use of the FileSystemObject to write out the file itself - but still all done in the stored pr

Note to self. DateTime.MaxValue does not equal SqlDateTime.MaxValue. Those 3 damn miliseconds.

If you do any work with ORM models (that's ORM as in Object Role Modeling, not as in Object-Relation Mapping) then you'll want to check out Scot Becker's blog at ObjectRoleModeling.com He's been posting like a madman with great tips and info related to ORM and Visio. His latest post on modelling multiple inheritance and setting primary supertypes saved me this week with a model I had the potential to really screw up.

I read an interesting post from Paul Wilson regarding the never-ending debate of whether to use stored procs or dynamic SQL for your data layer. As I mentioned before, I've always been a stored proc kind of guy. Why? Really just because I love them. I love to get a change of scenery everynow and then and work with some T-SQL. But after reading Paul's post I got thinking. I've never really even given the dynamic SQL route a try. We'll I've tried it, I love the idea of O/R mappers, but really just

I just read a new post on the Daily WTF. Although this one does raise some question of it's validity of being from real live production code, I tend to belive it because I've come across my share of completely idiotic & inane code from time to time. This one takes the cake.

A lot of SQL 2005 information has surfaced recently and I am as giddy as a school girl (how's that for a phrase that is bound to result in some Google weirdness?!). I've been more excited about this than about anything (Well, except for the release of .NET 2.0 of course). Here's a bit of SQL 2005 linkage for some good reading.

Do you know what the difference is between using SET and SELECT when assigning varaibles in T-SQL? Well, there is a difference. I came accross a great article by Narayana Vyas Kondreddi from the UK that describes the difference between the two.

So yesterday a debate surfaced that seemed to have the entire online programming community all worked up. Rob Howard, Microsoft ASP.NET Program Manager, posted to his blog about using stored procedures in SQL server. Many comments both for and against Rob's arguments in his post ensued. Things got a little heated when Frans Bouma stepped into the debate. Frans took his ideas to his own blog, and then you see the entire blogging community step in (via their own respective blogs) to add their own

A friend of mine, Scot Becker - President and Principal Consultant of Orthogonal Software, has put up a blog focused on object role modeling. If you work woth ORM, or really any kind of data modeling - you really need to check out this blog. It's pretty new, but already has some great content and ORM tips.