The Bit Bucket

If you’ve ever used SQL Server Reporting Services, you’ll notice that when you drag a database column into a table, it auto-magically converts the name of the column into a more English-readable name.

Image from MSDN

Notice how when the LineTotal column has been dragged into the table, the heading has been set to Line Total with a space. What it is doing is taking a Pascal-cased or camel-cased name and separating the words with spaces, based upon where the capital letters are.

2018-02-28

Many of my customers are software houses (ISVs). In almost all of them, I hear people complaining that they can’t find enough good staff. I think they are trying to tackle the wrong problem.

Most of the staff members they are trying to find are developers, and there are so many great developers out there, but you have to accept that they might not be in the location that you hope they’re in.

2018-02-27

I’ve done a lot of Microsoft exams over the years, mostly SQL Server ones but plenty of others too. And one thing that I really don’t like is when the questions are:

• Purely academic (ie: would never happen)
• Memory based (ie: who cares what the DTU limit is for a P3 today?)
• Clearly not written by someone who actually uses the product

Today, I want to mention an item in the last category.

2018-02-26

In an earlier post, I described the difference between state-based deployments and migration-based deployments. What I want to talk about today are two of the main issues that can arise in a migration-based deployment and what to do about one of them.

When you are using a migration-based deployment technique, you are storing all the scripts that take a database from its current state to the desired final state. While tools like Ready Roll make this is a relatively easy way to perform migrations, it suffers from a few key problems:

2018-02-23

The status bar at the bottom of a query window in SQL Server Management Studio contains a wealth of information in its default configuration.

The bottom left shows the connection state:

I’ll talk about connection management more in a later post. The bottom right also shows quite a bit:

In this case, it’s showing me that I’m connected to a server called SDUPROD; it’s running v14 of SQL Server (ie: SQL Server 2017); I’m logged on as GREGP50\Greg; my spid (or session ID) is 68; and I’m connected to the master database.

2018-02-22

I’m not a great fan of dynamic SQL (where you create a T-SQL command in code, then execute the command) but there are times when you just need to do it.

When creating dynamic SQL, it can get very painful trying to work out which strings are quoted and how many quotes you need.

To make this a bit easier, in our free SDU Tools, we added a function for QuoteString.

2018-02-21

A current trend that I can’t say that I love is constant churn within software applications. I have no interest to go back to the days where we got a new version of SQL Server or Power BI, etc. every few years.

It’s also not a case of who moved my cheese?

In fact, I thrive on change. However, I’ve now become really concerned about how anyone:

• Learns to use a complex application
• Remembers how to use a complex application when they don’t use it daily

I first really struck this issue with Azure. If I was teaching a class that used Azure, I could check every single lab on Sunday night, then Monday morning, the students would find it had all changed. That’s OK for an experienced person, but not OK for a learner.

2018-02-20

In an earlier post, I discussed the design of EAV (Entity Attribute Value) tables, and looked at why they get used. I’d like to spend a few moments now looking at the pros and cons of these designs.

Let’s use the same table as the last time as an example:

Pros

The main positive that’s typically described is that the schema is “flexible”. By this, the developers usually mean “I don’t have to change the database schema (or worse, have someone else change it) when my needs change”.

2018-02-19

If you have ever tried to write scripts to configure operating systems, you’d realize just how hard that is to get correct.

For example, if you need to ensure that your virtual machine has two network adapters, and they need to have a specific set of IP addresses, how do you do that?

Image by Markus Spiske

The traditional approach for PowerShell (and similar tools) was to try to write a step-by-step script to configure the network adapters the way you want. But where do you start? Do you write a script to check for any existing adapters and loop through them to try to remove them? Do you try to add the ones you want, and then remove the others?

2018-02-16

I’ve been very lucky over the years because I haven’t needed to wear glasses. Every now and then I’ve got some because I thought it might help with reading but then I find them more inconvenient than helpful. I’ve had one eye long-sighted and the other short-sighted. That’s been a really useful thing in day to day life.

However, where this comes unstuck is on modern laptops. There seems to be a current trend to pushing more and more pixels into the same size laptop screens but the applications aren’t helping to deal with that.

2018-02-15