I spend a lot of time delivering presentations of various types. Many of those presentations involve showing code in either SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) or Visual Studio (VS).
I’ve become quite fast at taking a default setup of SSMS and changing it to the fonts, etc. that I want to use for a presentation. Given how large these fonts are, I don’t want to use them for day-to-day work.
2025-06-08
A while back, I moved almost all of the simple websites that I work with, away from WordPress and over to Azure Static Web Apps. Overall, it has been a really good option for me.
For a start, having all my blog posts, etc. now properly in source control is wonderful. And I really enjoy being able to edit in Markdown.
For this to work though, you need a static website generator. After spending quite some time checking out YouTube videos, I opted to use Hugo as the generator. I was going to use MainRoad as the template for the site, but while it looked great, the development for it seemed to be pretty dead.
2025-06-07
Whenever I need to work on a new laptop or server, or whenever I change versions of SQL Server Management Studio, I kick myself for not remembering to export my settings, so I can import them again.
I spend quite a bit of effort getting SSMS configured the way I want, so it only makes sense to save the settings. Saving them isn’t perfect but it’s far better than not having done it.
2025-06-06
This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.
Section: Security Level: Advanced
Question:
You have a table named Sales.Customers that is owned by dbo. You also have a stored procedure named Sales.FindCustomers that searches the Sales.Customers table.
A user Terry is given permission to the procedure and can successfully execute the procedure.
2025-06-05
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:
And the bottom right shows quite a bit:
In this case, it’s showing me that I’m connected to a server (local)\SQL2022; it’s running v16 of SQL Server (ie: SQL Server 2022); I’m logged on as GREG7680\Greg; my SPID (or session ID) is 88; and I’m connected to the WideWorldImporters database.
2025-06-04
One thing I loved doing as a child was building and creating things. With models, there were two types of projects:
With Airfix models, the challenge was to follow the instructions to build the project, then great care required to paint and finalize the model. But there really wasn’t much creativity involved.
With basic building materials like Lego, creativity was needed to produce something that looked like (or let’s admit it often just “resembled”) whatever you were trying to build.
2025-06-03
I’ve been very lucky over the years because I haven’t needed to wear glasses. Every now and then I purchase a pair because I thought it might help with reading. Once I get them though, I find them more inconvenient than helpful and stop using them. I’ve am long-sighted in one eye and short-sighted in the other. That’s turned out to be a really useful thing in day to day life.
2025-06-02
This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.
Section: Administrator Level: Medium
Question:
You have an ETL process that loads employee details into a table named Staging.Employees. The table has the following columns:
The table is a heap and has no primary key.
2025-06-01
The built-in reports in SQL Server Management Studio are great but you can add your own as well. SQL Server 2005 and later have an option for Custom Reports. Let’s create a report that shows the use of deprecated data types. We’ll use a stored procedure from our free SDU Tools to do that. In SQL Server Data Tools, create a new Report Server project.
Give the project an appropriate name and location, then click Create.
2025-05-31
If you’ve worked with SQL Server (or with databases in general) for any length of time, you will have heard someone refer to Halloween protection. It refers to a problem where update operations could inadvertently end up modifying a row more than once.
The name Halloween protection comes from when the problem occurred during research on the System R project at the IBM Almaden Research Center back in 1976.
2025-05-30
