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SQL 2005 introduced DDL Triggers, where you could catch events on your DDL statements in SQL, and hopefully most DBA’s are catching them, at least to a table and have some kind of report on who is adding, changing and deleting what objects.
What I wanted to do was capture that, but also keep and automatic [...]

I use SQL Agent a ton. It is like my go to place to schedule jobs and tasks. Problem is, there are pieces “missing”. Like if a job hangs, you can have it auto stop after a given amount of time. It doesn’t alert on changes to a job, etc, etc.
I asked on twitter what [...]

Parent/Child. Order/Line. Header/Detail. Report/Sub-Report. We have all ran across these database designs and have had to write queries off of them. You usually end up having the parent id, and you need to get the children. Or you have a list of parents and need to loop through them, looking up the children records and [...]

I blogged a few weeks ago about creating Local Cubes with XMLA and ascmd.exe, and that is pretty cool, works great. There are some snags though if you use a server that is 64 bit. You can’t connect to the local cubes via .NET, Excel, or any other way. There are no drivers for local [...]

One of the cool new commands introduced in SQL 2005 was the PIVOT command (and UNPIVOT). One thing that has always irked me about PIVOT was that you need to “hard code” the column names you want to actually pivot on. This is usually fine for a static report, say you want to pivot on [...]

Throughout all my years in different places, I have seen SQL, Oracle, Firebird, MySQL, DB2, Zortec, Access, and probably a few other crazy databases set up and run, and administered. Of course most of them along the way have been Microsoft SQL Server, (6.5, 7, 2000, 2005, 2008). I’ve worked with some knowledgeable DBA’s, and [...]

Here is a tip about a setting that I think should be on by default, but it isn’t. How many times are you writing T-SQL in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and you need to just copy the results out, paste to Excel and either do more analysis or send off to someone. What happens [...]

Yammer iPhone app goes Open Source – Yammer is a kind of Twitter clone, but for your company. I believe it is made by the same people that created Geni.com. Pretty cool that it is open source, just another way to get a good idea on how to build iPhone apps. WordPress has their app [...]

Being that we are now in the year 2009, you would think that most people are currently using or have been using the Office 2007 suite for a couple of years now. The truth is that there are many businesses “in the wild” that are still standardizing on the Office 2003 suite.
Why? Well there are [...]

Dates are fun. See, by default most dates come out like 5/6/2008. But computers, and programs like them formatted as 05/06/2008. That way, all the dates, no matter what month or day, are all the same length, cool huh?
Well, in Reporting Services, if you have a date field coming back in a dataset, and you [...]