Blog

About me
By Art on May 3, 2017

I have been developing software from my early teens and stayed with technology after leaving school. Initially focussing on software development, networking and IT support type roles, I found my passion for SQL server shortly after the millennium and never looked back. Having a grounding in application development/networking, I have a great advantage when it comes to developing solutions with […]

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VirtualBox SQL FCI – Given Network Name Is Unusable
By Art on April 19, 2017

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 and a domain controller. All was good at the windows level so I proceeded to install a SQL cluster next but part way through the setup of […]

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Moved blog to Ghost
By Art on April 12, 2017

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.. However I just happened to look at my site recently and it appears that something was broke as a whole chunk of content wasn’t rendering at all. […]

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Olcot and Arratoon Ancestry
By Art on April 3, 2017

I have spent a fair amount of time researching the Olcot and Arratoon ancestry and I am very interested in the family tree, especially pre 1900 in India. If you are also researching the Olcot or Arratoon name then feel free to contact me so that we may share our findings.

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Pluralsight = Essential Training
By Art on September 11, 2016

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 free ways to learn I made a resolution to check out Pluralsight this year to see what the crack is. That task was made a whole load […]

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Update duplicate xml attribute values to unique value
By Art on June 23, 2016

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 down into a blog post earlier! Imagine the following contrived xml snippet which is essentially just a set of key/value pairs. At the moment the key names […]

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Recertification, too easy?
By Art on March 21, 2016

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 looking into what exams I needed to take and brushing up on all those new features in 2014 that I’ve yet to try out in anger. It […]

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UK Contractors – As you were, for now at least
By Art on November 26, 2015

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 of reports of doom and gloom from the various media channels suggesting that the end was nigh for contractors and freelancers due to new legislation to be […]

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Indexed views on any core SQL server edition-The video
By Art on October 10, 2015

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 most read blog posts. Since then Webucator, provider of SQL Server training, got in contact asking if they could convert the post into a video. I’ve seen […]

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SQL Server Contracting – The first 14 months (or so)
By Art on October 9, 2015

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 the world of contracting (or rather adjusted to working more than a mile away from where I live!), I will spend more time again giving my blog […]

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