The Bit Bucket

I spend a lot of time on client sites and time and again, one of the mistakes that I see people making, is trying to start with large projects. I think one of my all time favorite quotes about IT is:

Any successful large IT system used to be a successful small IT system.

The next time you’re thinking about creating a project that’s going to have a big bang outcome, please remember this. The history of the industry is that it really is likely to be a big bang, and not in terms of being a big success like you’d hoped for.

2019-01-18

If you are working with really long script files in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), you might need to work on more than one part of the script at the same time. Perhaps you need to work on a function, and also on the code that calls the function.

On the Window menu, there is a Split option.

When you first do this, you’ll see a split window with the same query at top and bottom:

2019-01-17

In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, there’s another useful scripting tool. It scripts out the logins that are members of server roles. It’s called ScriptServerRoleMembers.

One key advantage of having these scripting procedures and functions is that you incorporate them into other applications, and programmatically perform the scripting if you need to.

But if you just want to create a script, that works too.

By default, it lists permissions for all logins, but you can also provide a list of the logins that you’re interested in, as a comma-delimited list, to the @LoginsToScript parameter.

2019-01-16

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2019-01-15

Back to the transaction table

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the issues with a large transaction table where only a handful of the rows were unfinalized, and that we would never use an index to find all the rows that were finalized. But we’d certainly want an index defined for the ones that weren’t. If you haven’t read that post, I’d suggest you do so before continuing to read. You’ll find it here.

2019-01-14

I mentioned in a previous post about how one of my colleagues Orin Thomas is a prolific reader and every time I talk to him, he suggests more books that I should read. Another one in that category was No Ordinary Disruption One by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika, and Jonathan Woetzel. The sub-title is The four forces breaking all the trends.

The authors claim that our intuition on how the world works could be very wrong. I suspect that the degree of change in the accuracy of our perception is a recent, and accelerating thing. In the book, they are summarizing years of research they have done at the McKinsey Global Institute.

2019-01-11

When you get to a large number of query windows or other documents open as tabs in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), it can start to be difficult to keep track of them, and to find them when needed.

It’s not too bad when you can immediately find the tab that you want in the drop-down list:

But if you have more tabs than are shown in this drop-down list or if, like me, you often end up with many of them without names (as they are temporary), it can get very hard to find the few that you are mainly referring to.

2019-01-10

In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, there’s another useful scripting tool. It scripts out the server permissions that have been granted to logins. It’s called ScriptServerPermissions.

One key advantage of having these scripting procedures and functions is that you incorporate them into other applications, and programmatically perform the scripting if you need to.

But if you just want to create a script, that works too.

By default, it lists permissions for all logins, but you can also provide a list of the logins that you’re interested in, as a comma-delimited list, to the @LoginsToScript parameter.

2019-01-09

I don’t know if it’s considered some sort of modern trend, but what is it with applications now that just swallow errors instead of dealing with them? Is there an edict within these companies that errors should get shown, so they can argue their app doesn’t have errors?

I’m working with a SaaS app right now. It does editing. Sometimes when I save, it just doesn’t save. No error, just nothing saved. Or every now and then, I find the order of what I’ve entered just gets changed. Again, no error, but the order was changed.

2019-01-08

Clustered indexes vs heaps

OK so you know that a table can either be a heap or it can have a clustered index.  The first question of course, is which should I use?

If you have any doubt at all, put a clustered index on the table. Most SQL server tables will end up performing better that way. There are a few scenarios like log files where heaps will be preferable but if you’re not sure, start with a clustered index.

2019-01-07