All posts by: Joel Ewald
Optimization Smarts! Join Simplification
Someone recently read a post by Erik Darling over at BrentOzar.com titled Is it ever worth adding indexes to table variables. They were a little confused by the post and asked me about it. I thought I would break it...
Idempotent statements
Idempotent statements are those where applying the statement multiple times yields the same result. Commonly in database development this is significant during deployment activities. If we create a new table the deployment script will merely have the CREATE TABLE syntax....
SSIS Package Parts First Impressions
Reading the way package parts were described in the SQL 2016 release notes I was pretty excited. I remember having hundreds of SSIS packages where the overall structure was fairly redundant, this was before BIML was a thing, and package...
Planning Upgrades, Migrations, Consolidations.. SQL and more
Steve Jones posted a good editorial a month or so ago about why he typically prefers side-by-side migrations over in-place upgrades. If you are running virtualized and want to upgrade in-place then it is not horrendous if you need to revert back...
Gaps and Islands – Determining Continuous Hours
T-SQL Master Itzik Ben-Gan covered different solutions in SQL Magazine quite a few years ago, and there are many other articles out there about it. I thought I would give a current example we were solving where this came into...
Linked Server Inconsistent Meta Data Error and Synonyms
* Featured image from In most of our more recent tools we have a single layer in the ETL Staging solution that understands all of the connections to other systems / databases that need to be made. This layer is...
Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 Launched
Microsoft Launched Visual Studio 2017 a couple weeks ago. The launch included quite a few videos on new features and solutions people are using to solve problems. Take a look at the descriptions to see if anything speaks to you....
Splitting User Stories and Hamburgers
On paper writing a good user story sounds easy. “As a … I want.. So that I can”. While that may convey the basics it does not always actually tell the story. Roman Pichler lays out 10 Tips For Writing...
Microsoft Levels Features in SQL 2016
With SQL 2016 SP1 Microsoft has started to level features out across the editions. Many options that were previously enterprise only, can now be used in other editions, such as standard. Each edition still has differences in the amount of...
Moving SET NOEXEC OFF in SQLCMD deployment scripts
Currently when we build deployment packages we try to validate that the deployment is properly configured for the customer site to reduce errors. We do this by validating the version number, the database it is pointed to, connections are working,...