Humor

Why Bother Blogging? I blog primarily because there’s a Certain Kind of Person that irks me to no end. The kind of person who: Withholds information (you wouldn’t understand anyway) Mocks people for not knowing what they know (oh, you silly things) Uses the people they mock to validate their necessity (you’d be lost without…

Stupid T-SQL Tricks

June 6, 2018

Bad Idea Jeans, T-SQL

Presented without comment: Transact-SQL CREATE TABLE dbo.[FROM] ([SELECT] INT, [WHERE] INT, [LIKE] INT); GO SELECT [SELECT] FROM [FROM] WHERE [WHERE] LIKE [LIKE]; GO 1234 CREATE TABLE dbo.[FROM] ([SELECT] INT, [WHERE] INT, [LIKE] INT);GOSELECT [SELECT] FROM [FROM] WHERE [WHERE] LIKE [LIKE];GO Next up, can you break up a query with spaces? Yep: Transact-SQL SELECT * FROM…

Stuff People Tell Me Is The Default

May 18, 2018

Playing The Odds Assuming that life carries on as usual for a couple more weeks, I’ll have been a consultant here for three years. In that time, I’ve had some really interesting conversations with people, mostly about why things are the way they are on their servers. My favorite response is “isn’t that the default?”,…

Today’s Press Conference Transcript: I’m Running for Database Administrator General

May 14, 2018

Thanks for joining me today – I know you reporters are all really busy, and I appreciate you taking the time to attend this press conference. I’d like to start off by formally announcing my candidacy for Database Administrator General. There’s a lot of great candidates out there, but I think it’s time for me…

How To Break SQL Server’s XML Data Collection

April 7, 2018

No Comments

Oh, XML When we first met, it was about 2011. I had to load files full of you into a table. It wasn’t so bad. Seriously. You were well-formed, and didn’t change from file to file. Even using SQL Server 2005, I could take you. Later on, we got really close when I awkwardly started…

[Video] Office Hours 2018/04/01 with guest host Nigel Foulkes-Nock

April 1, 2018

Today’s Office Hours is brought to you by NigelDBA.com: Nicely done, @nigelDBA. Nicely done.

Let’s Give The Optimizer A Name

February 21, 2018

Clunky As my favorite monkey likes to say, the hardest things do with computers are: 1. Naming things 4. Asynchronous processing 2. Cache invalidation 5. Off by one errors Things are tough for Microsoft, too. Take “the optimizer” for instance. It’s based on something called the Cascades Framework. No one wants to say “Cascades Framework”,…

How to Throttle Logins to SQL Server

February 20, 2018

Bad Idea Jeans

So, uh, you can use WAITFOR in a logon trigger: Transact-SQL CREATE OR ALTER TRIGGER SorryNorm ON ALL SERVER FOR LOGON AS BEGIN IF ORIGINAL_LOGIN()= 'NormTheNewGuy' WAITFOR DELAY '00:00:15'; END; GO 123456 CREATE OR ALTER TRIGGER SorryNorm ON ALL SERVER FOR LOGON ASBEGINIF ORIGINAL_LOGIN()= 'NormTheNewGuy' WAITFOR DELAY '00:00:15';END;GO You probably don’t want it to be TOO…

#TSQL2sday: What I’m Passionate About – Sas Christian’s Art

February 13, 2018

For this month’s T-SQLTuesday, Aaron Bertrand asked what we’re passionate about – but outside of the tech community, and asked for pictures. Seems like a great way to get to know about us. From my personal blog and my Instagram feed, you probably already know that I’m into cars, travel, and food, so I wanted…

Creating Insert Triggers to Silently Ignore Data You Don’t Want

February 8, 2018

Bad Idea Jeans, T-SQL

Say you’ve got an application that insists on inserting data into the database, and…you don’t want the data. You want the application to THINK it inserted the data – you don’t want to roll it back or return an error to the end user. You just don’t want the data, and you don’t want the…

Things I Have Not Heard Recently

February 5, 2018

Brent Ozar Unlimited Team

“No, don’t bother the DBA. It’s probably not a database problem.” “But it says right here that it worked on my machine.” “Solid state storage sure is overrated.” “Thank God for auto-shrink, really saved the day again.” “We’re not picky – you can apply updates whenever you want, whenever’s convenient.” “The VM admin said to…

Database History: The Inventor of the Data Page

December 15, 2017

Database History

Do you ever wonder about the history of the systems you rely on every day? They didn’t teach us database history in school. Instead, we got calculus and art and interpretive dance. Fat lot of good that did us, right? So from time to time, we’re taking it upon ourselves to bring you the history…

Can you prevent deletes and inserts without a WHERE clause from running?

December 14, 2017

Bad Idea Jeans, Humor

dba, development, sql server

File this under bad idea thong In the tradition of Klaus Aschenbrenner wanting to prevent people from writing SELECT * queries, I thought it might be nice to prevent people from running deletes or updates without a WHERE clause. In a vaguely scientific way. Now, I don’t really condone this. It just seemed funny at…

French makes everything sound so sexy.

October 20, 2017

Even error messages: Transact-SQL SELECT * FROM sys.messages WHERE language_id = 1036; 12 SELECT * FROM sys.messagesWHERE language_id = 1036; Produces: Talk dirty reads to me These sound better than anything I would ever write in a romantic letter: “SQL Server a détecté une corruption de mémoire matérielle dans la base de données « %1! », à l’ID…

Do Variables Exist?

October 17, 2017

I know, I know I swore I’d never talk about variables again. Then I ran into some funny business. Maybe it was quite as funny as the Temp Table Ghosts, but hey. What’s as funny as temp tables? It’s in your heaaaaaaaad If I run this, what do you think will come back? Transact-SQL IF…

Bad Idea Jeans: Finding Undocumented Trace Flags

October 4, 2017

Bad Idea Jeans

I need to start this blog post with a disclaimer: you should not be doing this. Hell, *I* should not be doing this. But when SQL Server 2017 came out Monday, I noticed a few unusual SNAPSHOT_MATERIALIZATION entries in sys.messages and a few related undocumented system objects that hinted about a new feature Microsoft hadn’t…

Answering Questions For Fun And No Profit

September 21, 2017

I love answering questions about SQL My forum of choice is dba.stackexchange.com because I find the voting and point system with badges for being a decent internet person addictive. If you like more traditional forums, SQLServerCentral.com has a lot of really smart people on it as well. When I post questions or answers, I try…

The Ghosts of Temp Tables Past

September 19, 2017

True story You may find it hard to believe, but I recently had to fix a small bug in sp_BlitzCache and sp_BlitzQueryStore. Since both stored procedures have similar functions, they also share some temp table names (mainly the ones for parsing down XML nodes to more manageable chunks). In the window where I was making…

What If Week: What Would You Look At First?

August 16, 2017