The term Code Smells is not my invention. It has been around for a while. Code Smells are those areas of code that work. They meet the application requirements. But, they aren’t well formed, and benefit from refactoring. A good example of a code smell is when you see duplication of code. At that point, you know there is a […]

I’m working through some issues with the editor. Please forgive the formating, if it is hard to read. I also am unable to link to the previous editorial introducing this SQL Puzzler. It should show on the site with my list of editorials. Regardless, today I’m sharing the simple answer to the problem. Just use a cursor. There are more […]

Here’s a little SQL Challenge for those of you who like to do SET logic instead of procedural loops, etc. I have an SQL Query that doesn’t behave the way I thought it should. I have a table containing a list of phrases. I want to modify the table of phrases, replacing each word in the phrase with an abbreviation […]

Thanks to all of the many people responding to my request for feedback. It is helping me shape the direction for editorials next year. I especially appreciate the replies where English is not your first language. Your grammar was much better than mine. I’ll be humbled for quite some time. One reply did pose a question regarding how to protect […]

Today I’m going to do a little bit of trolling, trying to get feedback from you. Instead of asking which is better between two competing products, I am asking for your feedback to continue, and improve my daily column. I’d like you to leave a comment, or drop me an Email, answering any of the following questions: Why do you […]

I haven’t written about some basic SQL for a while. Today I want to return to the topic by talking about the OUTPUT clause available in the TSQL SQL Syntax, with the equivalent of RETURNING in Oracle and others. Irrespective of the Key Word, the benefit is equivalent. The goal using OUTPUT is to be able to know the records […]

If you have been following the EAV Relational Database Pattern introduced last Wednesday, then you may be wondering what other patterns allow you can to gain similar benefit without the pain of an EAV? Today I’m going to suggest some other ideas. The problem with an EAV is that it is a many to many structure. Let’s say you want […]

The Entity Attribute Values (EAV) database pattern has been around for a long time. The purpose of an EAV is to store data where the shape is not known at the time the database schema is created. In essence, you simulate the SQL Engine by creating tables to define data. Then you create additional tables to contain the data defined. […]

While looking at in-memory database engines I started thinking about other in memory database engine types. SQLCE (SQL Server Compact Edition) is also a form of an In-Memory database engine. The difference is that what is in memory is the database engine alone, not the data it supports. The compact edition still uses a file for the data, just like […]

I’ve been seeing interest in the In Memory Database feature released in SQL Server 2014. Using a database maintained only in memory, available in SQL Server Enterprise edition for production systems, allows you optimized performance by only storing transaction logs to disk. By storing transaction logs to disk, in memory database data may be re-constituted when the database is closed […]