The Bit Bucket

Yesterday, I posted about why software houses don’t keep up to date with SQL Server releases. That’s one issue but there’s also a deeper issue. When I saw postings from product group members about this, it was predominantly DBAs that they are talking to.

I think this is targeting entirely the wrong people for this discussion.

For many years now, almost all the discussion from the product group to “customers” seems to have focused on DBAs. These people are often at the end of the chain in many organizations.

2018-06-26

There has been quite a bit of discussion online lately about which version of SQL Server new applications should target. Members of the SQL Server product group were saying they can’t see any reason why new applications should use anything less than SQL Server 2016 as a real base line.

I’d love to see any new application using the absolute latest version of SQL Server. Unlike the bad old days where you needed to wait for a service pack before using the product, the best tested version of SQL Server is invariably the one that’s just released. (And there aren’t service packs any more anyway).

2018-06-25

I’ve been reading and/or listening to a lot of books again lately and one that I didn’t have high expectations for, but ended up really liking was Donald Miller’s Building a Story Brand.

If you are a business owner, I’d suggest listening to it or reading it. It takes a really refreshing approach of what he calls using a story brand framework.

When you need to tell someone what your business does, how do you describe that?

2018-06-22

When I’m doing a lot of query editing, I often get a bit mesmerized, particularly if there’s a lot of manual copy and paste or cut and paste going on.

One thing that often drives me crazy is when I use Ctrl-C (ie: copy) when I meant to use Ctrl-V (ie: paste). Invariably, I do this when I have nothing highlighted at all. So not only did I not get the value pasted, I just copied an empty value into the clipboard.

2018-06-21

Service Broker is one of my favorite tools in SQL Server. So many applications need to have a transactional queue, and many people try to build them using tables and other objects. But SQL Server has Service Broker and with it, you get the beauty of using the knowledge of someone who already knows about queues having thought about how they need to work.

But while Service Broker is quite forgiving, it’s common while developing Service Broker applications to make mistakes and end up with messages in queues that will never be delivered because you had some bug in your code. Service Broker doesn’t want to ever just throw your data away.

2018-06-20

One of the software houses that I’ve done some work for over the years has had a number of unexpected issues with their clients and had to shed quite a lot of their staff. This is always a concerning time and I’m seeing a lot of worried and unhappy people. Either they don’t think  their jobs will last, or they are upset at having been moved to roles that they don’t want.

2018-06-19

Recently, I posted about the templates folder for SQL Server Reporting Services designer moving in Visual Studio 2017. You’ll find that blog post here.

I’ve also now found that the Private Assemblies folder has moved too. I do wish these locations would be fixed, shared, and known rather than needing to play hide and seek when updates are made to the SSRS designer tooling.

The Private Assemblies folder was used to hold a copy of any .NET assemblies that are referenced in your SSRS projects. By using .NET assemblies, you can share logic that’s used in reports. It’s worth noting that wherever we can, we try to avoid using .NET assemblies for this, and wish that SSRS had a way of dealing with common code inclusions, but that’s a topic for another day.

2018-06-18

I have many friends who would have checked the calendar when they first heard that Microsoft was buying Github. They would have guessed it was April 1st.

I think it’s another pretty bold strategic move by Satya Nadella.

It’s been interesting to see all the naysayers coming out of the woodwork to beat up on the idea of Microsoft owning Github, as though it was going to be the death of Github. Almost every single time I hear a justification though, it is based on their opinion of Microsoft or something they did often decades ago.

2018-06-15

Visual Studio is a very configurable tool, and particularly in the area of keyboard shortcuts. Because SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is based on Visual Studio, it inherits many of these configuration options. SSMS has a very rich set of keyboard shortcuts. Without trying to cover most of them, I do want to highlight a few that I think are really important to know how to use.

Let’s start with an easy set of commands:

2018-06-14

I often need to convert values from one data type to another, particularly when working with strings. One function that I’m surprised wasn’t already built in to SQL Server was one that converts a character to its hexadecimal representation.

There is an ASCII function. You can see it here:

This converts a character to its ASCII value (see http://asciitable.com )

We’ve added a function to our free SDU Tools collection for developers and DBAs. It’s called CharToHexadecimal and you can see what it does in the main image above.

2018-06-13