Last year Joel (of JoelOnSoftware.com [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/index.html] ) wrote an article that had a little blurb on the “MSDN Way [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html]” of doing things. That basically amounted to always using the newest, fanciest tools to solve a problem. Why use…
I wish I remember where I saw this posted. I owe mad props to someone but I can't remember who. If your server has lots of databases that you don't have access to and you connect using Enterprise Manager you may have noticed that it takes…
In my long tradition of releasing odd utilities (ok, utility) that no one but me uses I think I've come up with a winner. On one of my projects we've created an extensive database build process using NAnt [http://nant.sourceforge.net/]. This process creates the…
Now that I have a blog and the SQLTeam.com homepage to post on I wonder which is more appropriate for each thing I'm posting. Anyway. I posted a blurb on the April CTP [http://www.sqlteam.com/item.asp?ItemID=21001] which is really the long awaited…
I've been trying to import data from an Excel spreadsheet using DTS. I've been having problems with sparsely populated columns. Basically if the first eight rows are blank it ignores any other values in the following rows. This is because the Excel driver is only examing…
We've been asked to post this by Microsoft: This is an invitation given by Microsoft to leading edge application developers to participate in a research survey that seeks feedback on improving the application development experience working with data platforms. In the best interest of developers, the objectives of…
Microsoft is doing a series of webcasts [http://msdn.microsoft.com/SQL/2005Webcasts/] starting on December 6th, 2004. These are focusing on developer related topics. Definitely worth a look. And did I mention they're giving away XBOX's?…
(Is Memorability really a word?) Anil John has an interesting post on the effectiveness of remembering certain types of passwords [http://cyberforge.com/weblog/aniltj/archive/2004/10/14/689.aspx]. He also discusses the strength of each type of password.…
You can get them here [http://msdn.microsoft.com/sql/teched/].…
Lately I've been working on a small utility to process SQL Server trace files. If you use scripted traces to generate trace files there's no automated way to get these into a SQL Server table. I wrote a little .NET utility to do it for me…