October 2006 - Posts

• Constructive versus Deconstructive

  I have been struggling to find a way to describe the fundamentals of first normal form for my PASS presentation, and this came to mind last night. SQL works in a very constructive way, meaning that if you have base values (commonly referred to as atomic, Read More... Posted Wednesday, October 18, 2006 7:56 PM by drsql | 0 Comments Filed under: T-SQL, Database Design

• Automatic indexing is cool...plus something to tell you what indexes aren't used

  Now, I will admit up front that I haven't technically tried out all of their bits and pieces of the following tool, but over the past week I have made a lot of use of some of the indexing suggestions by "hacking" out the code that generates the index Read More... Posted Thursday, October 12, 2006 6:28 PM by drsql | 0 Comments Filed under: SQL Server, Dynamic Management Objects

• SQL Server Samples Blog

  On a private newsgroup I read, the question was asked: "Samples in or out of the box? For the next release of SQL Server we're thinking of just shipping sample code on the web, instead of shipping on the web and also in the SQL Server box on a CD as we Read More... Posted Wednesday, October 11, 2006 10:34 PM by drsql | 0 Comments Filed under: SQL Server, Documentation

• When is denormalization the best thing?

  Oh no, you may be thinking, he has gone off the deep end. Preparing for his talk on normalization at PASS this year he has finally cracked and said "to heck with it, just denormalize..." If you thought that, shame on you, and minus 10 points for you. Read More... Posted Tuesday, October 10, 2006 7:52 PM by drsql | 2 Comments Filed under: Database Design

• Data correctness during the development process

  During all phases of development, particularly when building a completely new system, it is very common to have a need for data to test with. As important as this is for a UI system, the need is doubled is when you are working on a reporting system. While Read More... Posted Monday, October 09, 2006 8:02 PM by drsql | 0 Comments Filed under: Best Practices, Development

• Red Gate's new refactor tool CTP has been released to the public

  A subject I have ranted about from time to time (here on the blog of course, in private I rant about this at least once a day...) is code formatting . It is always a real pain to get some code from a user from the web (or someone else, closer to you) Read More... Posted Tuesday, October 03, 2006 10:21 PM by drsql | 0 Comments Filed under: SQL Server, Third Party Tools

• Another reason to hate quoted identifiers...

  I was working with the Redgate compare tool today (something I am a big fan of I might add,) using it to take a snapshot of my database so I could drop all code and do a collation change to a database (an article I updated because I discovered a new wrinkle Read More... Posted Sunday, October 01, 2006 8:06 PM by drsql | 0 Comments Filed under: SQL Server, T-SQL