I had the pleasure of presenting at the SSWUG Spring 2016 Virtual Conference today on the topic of SQL 2016 Temporal Tables. Thank you to all who attended! Here are the slides and demo scripts for that presentation.
Tomato, Tomato – Assumptions about Regionalization
This month’s TSQL Tuesday prompt is on the topic of assumptions. I’d like to take a brief moment and talk about one of the more insidious and pervasive sources of bugs in TSQL application code I’ve seen over the years. Let’s say I present you with a date: 08/12/2014 Quick! What month am I talking about? Read more »
Killing Sessions with External Wait Types
This afternoon I was asked a question that comes up once or twice a year by email. I answered as usual, and only later realized that the topic was a reasonably good match for this month’s TSQL Tuesday topic. I thought I might share the question, and the answer, with a larger audience this time. Read more »
Care and Feeding of Your System Databases Webcast
Over the summer it’s been my privilege to speak on the subject of Care and Feeding of Your System Databases at the CACTUSS SQL Server user groups in Austin as well as at SQLSaturday #222 in Sacramento. With the assistance of Idera and MSSQLTips.com, that presentation is also available online for viewing. Here is the Read more »
SQL Server bug: Incorrect values in sys.dm_db_session_space_usage for deferred drops
For the past few months I have been chasing down an issue which has been plaguing my attempts at tempdb monitoring, and in just the last week I’ve received news that it is indeed a confirmed bug in SQL Server. I’m sharing what I’ve found here for the benefit of the SQL community. One of Read more »
Speaking at CACTUSS User Groups in Austin next week
After taking a break from speaking for a while, I’m happy to announce that I’ll be presenting at the CACTUSS Central and CACTUSS North meetings in Austin, TX on May 20 and May 21, respectively. I’ll be bringing a new presentation, “Care and Feeding of Your System Databases.” We’ll go over the SQL Server system Read more »
Obfuscated T-SQL Holiday Cards
As a student I was always a great fan of the International Obfuscated C Code Contest. If you’re not familiar with obfuscation contests, they’re basically a two part brain teaser for coders. The first part, and the one I find really satisfying, is to write code to do some task in a completely non-obvious way Read more »
Troubleshooting “A severe error occurred on the current command.”
I thought it might be useful to start a semi-regular series of entries on troubleshooting for the SQL Server developer. Google has come to my rescue lo, these many times: this is my way of returning the favor. For this first entry I thought I’d tackle one of the more mysterious-looking runtime errors I see Read more »
Speaking at SQLSaturday #111 in Atlanta on April 14
A month from today on April 14, 2012 I’ll be speaking at SQLSaturday #111 in Atlanta, GA (or, more precisely, in Alpharetta, GA). This will be my first trip to Georgia and I’m delighted to be able to present alongside some of the biggest names in the SQL Server community. It’s a great honor to be Read more »