Last week I spoke about a world wary data type for storing dates and times in a single column, with a granularity of three milliseconds, DATETIME. But let’s say you don’t need that kind of… Dates and Times in SQL Server: SMALLDATETIME
Last year I ran a series of posts about Database Fundamentals. Over the next few weeks, I will cover the basics of various date and time data types in SQL Server, when to use them,… Dates and Times in SQL Server: DATETIME
Nested views are bad. Let’s get that out of the way. What is a nested view anyway? Imagine that you have a SELECT statement you tend to use all over the place (a very common… Why nested views are bad
Tom Roush The SQL Family lost a much admired member to cancer last month, Tom Roush. In our little community, Tom was a well-known raconteur who wrote around a hundred stories, many of which were… Help the fight against cancer
Victoria is on an island off the coast of Vancouver, British Columbia. The island is wisely called Vancouver Island. It is beautiful there, and I wouldn’t mind retiring there someday. Those of you who listen… Speaking at SQLSaturday 725 in Victoria
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I will be presenting for the first time at SQLBits in London, on Saturday 24 February 2018. My session is called Back to the future with Temporal… Speaking at SQLBits next month
By now you have probably seen the news about a major flaw in the design of CPUs from all major vendors (Intel, AMD, and ARM) resulting in a series of vulnerabilities in operating systems and… Secure or fast? Secure, obviously …
A year ago, I wrote in a post that cloud computing is just someone else’s data center. I was wrong. Whether we like it or not, the cloud is more than just a bunch of 1s… The cloud is not just someone else’s computer
I have been working on a new information session, which I’m hoping to deliver this year. It’s about one of my favourite topics: dates and times. On that note, if you are reading this in… Welcome to 2018
In November 2017, during the PASS Summit keynote, Microsoft’s Bob Ward (Principal Architect) demonstrated a “diskless database” running on Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) hardware. The storage layer is known as “persistent memory”. At the end of… No moving parts, the story of persistent memory
A quick post this week, since it’s that time of the year when people do gift exchanges and put up colourful lights. Here goes: If we need to remove an unused index, we should disable… Disable, don’t delete those indexes
When I need to clear my head, I go for a walk. When I need to think about a problem, I go for a walk. When I need to plan a new talk, I go… Take a walk
This post is a public service announcement for all users of macOS High Sierra (10.13). (Note: Apple has already released a fix, but if you do not have automatic updates enabled, this may still affect… All Mac users should do this immediately
(Last edited on 9 January 2020) Note: This was originally written for the book SQL Server 2017 Administration Inside Out, but did not meet the publishing deadline. A revised version is now included in the… Introducing Azure Data Studio
In the grand scheme of things, MySQL and SQL Server operate in different realms. It’s difficult to compare them because MySQL is predominantly used for websites as part of the free LAMP stack (Linux, Apache,… MySQL has this feature that SQL Server needs