Microsoft SQL Server's Profiler is a necessity when digging around on a SQL server trying to find any bottlenecks or long running queries. How you personally lock down your profiling session to show o...
When updating a project’s Database Schema as part of your deployment strategy, you want to automate as much of the process as possible to avoid human errors. If you have a Visual Studio Premium instal...
SQL Express is pretty awesome as a light weight database server, and when Microsoft released it using the same database engine as the full version they did the world a huge favour. I have seen SQL Exp...
Having a good Continuous Integration setup is the gift that keeps on giving, but what about your database? For most web applications these days, your database is a large part of your application – so ...
Working with Stored Procedures and functions on a database tier can be time consuming, hard to debug and sometimes just difficult to get clarity on what is “happening”. A rarely discussed feature of M...
I watched an interesting thing take place the other day, in the form of someone using the visual tooling in SQL Management Studio to “Edit Top 200 rows” in a table, then realising that the record they...
MS SQL Server has a habit of sprouting enormous appendages in the form of log files. Like the infamous Tree Man from Indonesia, sometimes this can be a situation that gets out of control. The SQL erro...
I have been written a number of posts recently taking a look at Microsoft SQL and some items of it's more obtuse feature set – Microsoft SQL CLR support is one of these hidden gems. Whether you want t...
So in today's day and age stored procedures are not a new thing at all. DotNet Developers seem to put themselves in one of two camps, those that think they are awesome and use them for everything, and...
In the modern world we live in with Web Services, RPC calls and the like, SQL server has had a lot of work on its hands trying to keep its followers from leaving to newer ways to store data such as do...
One of the niggling that often happens when your deployed to a cheap shared hosting environment is having your table owners change on you. If you have created a data access layer that references table...
There are quite a few built-in stored procedures in Microsoft's SQL Server that can help you troubleshoot database issues and make those long nights less painful. Knowing they exist can be a life save...
It seems we live in an age where a lot of things are taken for granted on the web. Alternative spellings of things being offered to us when we search is a common example of this – simply look at Googl...
Recently I was working on a project where I had to return a simple list of products, and if they had images associated with them, return information about only one along with the product. Times like t...
If you have ever had to setup or manage an Umbraco installation you will know both the pleasure and the occasional pain that it can bring. Umbraco is part of the growing list of “oober cool” up and co...
There are many times when there can be a requirement to disconnect users from your Microsoft SQL database. Sometimes you can have bad code keeping connections alive that shouldn’t be, other times your...
Today i was battling in the trenches while trying to fix a deployment issue on a foreign webhost with a support team that had a lead time of 3 days on a support ticket when i came across a very annoyi...