VM VirtualBox SQL FCI - Given Network Name Is Unusable The other day I needed to test some HADR requirements on my local machine so using VirtualBox, I created a 2 server Windows 2012 R2 failover cluster with shared storage provided by FreeNAS
Moved blog to Ghost Another year, another blog update lol!... Last year I remember doing a significant version upgrade for my self-hosted Orchard CMS software on the DiscountASP hosting platform and it all seemed to work fine.
Training Pluralsight = Essential Training Edit (11-Sep-2016) See comment that pricing tiers have been adjusted since this blog post I've been aware of Pluralsight for a couple of years and as I'm always looking for very cheap or
XQuery Update duplicate xml attribute values to unique value I was going through some really old blogging ideas and I stumbled over this one and seeing as I love finding creative solutions in XQuery, I'm not sure why I hadn't got this
Certification Recertification, too easy? 3 years I was awarded the MCSE: Data Platform certification and as per the recertification rules, I needed to recertify this year to keep it active. So shortly after Christmas I set about
Career UK Contractors - As you were, for now at least I think there were are few sighs of relief around the country yesterday after the chancellor finished giving his autumn financial statement to parliament. For the past few weeks there has been plenty
Indexes Indexed views on any core SQL server edition-The video A few months back I created a blog post showing that you can indeed create and use indexed views on any core SQL server edition. It has proved to be one of my
Career SQL Server Contracting - The first 14 months (or so) Crikey, where did that time go! I have been so busy adjusting to my new work life style I have completely neglected my blog.. Well now that I seem to be adjusted to
Xml XQuery - Accessing the Attributes Axis Working with a sequence of attributes in XQuery is fairly straight forward with the 'attribute' axis even if you don't know or need to know the attribute names. By using this axis you
Blogging Updated blog Site This post is mainly to test the syndication still works correctly from my heavily updated web/blog site so apologies for the non-SQL nature of it. Finally after promising myself to do so
SQLCLR Creating cards in Trello via the REST API and parsing the returned JSON all in a SQL CLR I recently blogged about how good I thought Trello was and shortly afterwards I found out that they did provide a full read/write RESTful API. Awesome! After a bit of thought I
Synonyms Drop and Recreate all Synonyms Had a quick job the other day restoring a pair of databases under different names which is all straight forward enough, but each database in the pair uses quite a few synonyms to
SQLCLR Convert UK Postcode to Latitude/Longitude/Northing/Easting using SQL CLR Just a quick post this time. I had a requirement to convert a small number of UK based postcodes to their latitude/longitude locations so I could use that data within some Tableau
Indexes Using indexed views on ANY core SQL server edition I was having a discussion the other day and was quite surprised to hear that there still appears to be a slight misconception regarding being able to use indexed views on web or
SQLBits Thank You SQLBits! Just a very quick post to say thank you to all the organisers, speakers, helpers, sponsors, venue staff, caterers, party entertainers, long suffering partners and anyone else involved with the event as it
Career Time for a change in career A few months back I made the decision to leave the relative comfort and security of my permanent role and head into the world of contracting & consulting. Whilst a big decision and
Internals Deferred-drop tipping point I was intrigued by the deferred-drop feature that has been inside SQL since SQL Server 2000 SP3 after watching one of Paul Randal's Pluralsight courses which was 'Logging, Recovery and the Transaction Log'.
SQL 2012 Most important feature of SQL 2014 There are a whole raft of cool new features in 2014 including things like In-Memory OLTP, increased Azure integration/options and a new cardinality estimation design to name a few. But for me,
Ramblings Currys having apostrophe trouble Before I start I just want to say that much of this post is mere speculation on my part and not specifically targeted at Currys. They just happen to be the catalyst and
Fun FIGlet SQLCLR ASCII Font Art If you haven't heard of the name before, you must have seen what it does at some point. FIGlet which was first developed in the '90s is a freeware large ASCII art generator
Service Broker Just Wow!! features Over the years with each release I'm often impressed by some of the features contained in SQL server but every so often, I start to use a feature that I haven't used before
SSMS Basic RegEx in SSMS Have you ever had that moment where you have gone "Geez.. I wish I'd learnt this stuff ages ago" after realising just how much more productive you'd have been since!! That
Xml And that is 2013 I've been blogging for a couple of years now and although I've never been a prolific blogger (and never will!), I like to get at least one post out a month. However next
Performance Getting the read/write ratio for a database Edit: Please also see in depth comment from Brent Ozar on my main site which extends the query provided below by adding extra columns to give the data more context and general advice
Xml Removing HTML formatting tag - BR - from XML using XQuery This is a personal pet hate of mine.. Mixing HTML formatting tags directly with XML that aren't escaped or contained within a CDATA section. Sure it is all perfectly valid XML at the