Data lakes and swamps, oh my
I was lamenting to my friend and fellow MVP Shamir Charania (blog | Twitter) that I didn’t have a topic for this week’s blog post, so he and his colleague suggested I write about data…
Performance as a feature, software developer edition
Relational database management systems (RDBMS) like SQL Server and Azure SQL Database are very good at managing normalized data. Efficient storage and retrieval of data is the name of the game, so performance is a…
Community recognition
On the first day of January 2017, I was honoured to receive an email naming me as a Microsoft MVP in the Data Platform category. In the previous couple of months leading up to that,…
Update your production servers and stop making excuses about it
Folks, we all like to make sure we’re doing our level best to make things work smoothly. So why am I staring at someone’s server that has never been updated since it was first set…
Dates and Times in SQL Server: DATENAME()
Last time we looked at DATEPART(). This post is all about the DATENAME() function. So many similarities There are many similarities between DATEPART and DATENAME. Where DATEPART returns the date or time part as an…
Dates and Times in SQL Server: DATEPART()
In my previous posts in this series we’ve seen reference to Transact-SQL (T-SQL) functions that are used to get the specific part of a date and/or time (year, month, day, hour, minute, second, etc.). This…
T-SQL aside: replace PRINT with RAISERROR
I was minding my own business innocently reading a blog post by Erik Darling, when this tip smacked me in the proverbial forehead. I even learned something that had always bothered me but had been…
Dates and Times in SQL Server: the problem with DATETIME
Recently I wrote a post about date and time functions you should never use, which contained an opinion I’ve expressed previously that some people have disagreed with, namely that DATETIME is a terrible data type which…
Virtual Log Files: 200 or 1000?
Last week I had the privilege of reviewing possibly the best SQL Server production environment I’ve seen in Canada. During the follow-up meeting, the senior DBA and I had a discussion about Virtual Log Files…
Dates and Times in SQL Server: more functions you should never use
Previously we looked at four built-in functions to get the current date and time in SQL Server and Azure SQL Database using Transact-SQL (T-SQL). We identified that out of the options provided, SYSUTCDATETIME() is the…
A big thank you
Thank you! Thank you for reading my blog. Thank you for buying my book. Thank you for attending my sessions at SQLSaturdays and SQLBits. Thank you for providing session feedback to help me improve. Thank…
Dates and Times in SQL Server: What about TIMESTAMP?
It occurred to me that we haven’t covered the TIMESTAMP data type in this series about dates and times. TIMESTAMP is the Windows Millennium Edition of data types. It has nothing to do with date…
Dates and Times in SQL Server: T-SQL functions to get the current date and time
We have come on quite a journey so far. SQL Server and Azure SQL Database provide date and time data types to help you design the best possible database. You can read more about that…
Dates and Times in SQL Server: the science of time redux
Last time, we began an in-depth look at how time is measured. This post continues our journey. If any of you are students of Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity, this might seem familiar.…
Dates and Times in SQL Server: the science of time
Now that we have covered the various date and time data types (see the post from last time) in SQL Server and Azure SQL Database, it’s time to review what we know about time itself…