It’s been a little while since I wrote a blog post on my favourite subject but this is from a thread on the SSC Xml forum that I was helping out on a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been a bit busy lately with a big project at work, revising/taking exam 70-461 and getting ready for the birth of my second child! But this thread seemed too good a subject for me to miss quickly get a post out showing how I might approach this particular problem.

Sometimes we are given a pretty poorly … more

The agenda for the SQLBits event in May was announced today and after a quick look earlier today, it looks like there is a great choice covering a wide range of topics both in and around SQL server. Understandably there are a number of sessions on Azure, about 5 or 6 I think, which shows one of the main themes at the moment happening in the real world. I’m a big fan of Azure and the cloud and have been embracing it for various things where I work. For myself I can only see bigger adoption … more

There is a new CU update for SQL 2012 SP1 and I noticed a very interesting new feature described in the documentation blogged here.

This is one of two new improvements and it is described as:

You can now directly create a backup to Windows Azure Storage using SQL Server Native Backup functionality. This will allow users to back up a SQL Server database on an on-premises instance or on an instance of SQL Server that is running in a hosted environment, such as the Windows Azure Virtual Machine. … more

I bet you are half wondering what is the first? Well that would be the birth of my second child which due in March so you could say that SQLBits XI is my most “professional” eagerly awaited event of 2013.

Last Friday I was just about to head off to get some lunch at around 12 and I just happened to look up at my emails and saw the email that I had been waiting weeks to see. That was the email saying that SQLBits registrations has now opened. I didn’t hang around at this point. … more

Sometimes we need to retrieve a list distinct values from within an xml instance or even distinct nodes and this is relatively straight forward using XQuery. It gets a bit more complicated if you have attributes in the xml, but it is still possible to retrieve unique xml nodes. On the flip side, it is also possible to only return xml nodes that are duplicated in the xml instance. All the examples can be downloaded here

Retrieving Distinct Values

Getting a list of distinct atomic values from a … more

I read a blog a few months ago by Ramkumar Gopal (blog) in which he had setup a Facebook page to record and post things that he doesn’t want to create a blog post for. I thought this was a really good idea for a whole host of reasons, so much so I went ahead and setup a community Facebook page for myself as well.

My blog, like many others, is syndicated to a couple of large SQL server sites so I’m quite careful with my blogging. I only blog once or twice a month (too busy to blog … more

When I saw an email from SQLBits announcing SQLBits XI in East Midlands in my inbox this morning, it simply made my day! Fantastic!!! I can’t wait now until the registration is open as I’ll be signing up as quickly as I can for the full event. I’m already seeking approval from my company for them to fund this as part of my training and development so that nothing delays from registering when it becomes available. Even if they say no I’ll fund this myself as this event is … more

Over the weekend I received an email supposedly from Microsoft Live wanting me to verify my account and provided a verification code in the email to do that. It was a simple plain text email with no images or anything so I thought that this was just a spoof email attempt. I hovered the mouse over the link to where the email is saying it would send me to see where the link would really send me and I was quite surprised to see that the link was not spoofed and it was actually the URL of Windows … more