A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Louis Davidson has made a big mistake:
As I sit here, preparing to write my roundup post, I have not read anyone else’s post yet. I thought it would be good to introduce the idea first, recap to the other posts, then mine. I won’t share any detail of the mistake I shared, but I do want to mention something I included in my post. Types of mistakes. Mistakes of choice, and mistakes of accidents.
Read on for a nice round-up of a popular topic.
Leave a CommentI haven’t participated in a #TSQL Tuesday in quite some time. I saw this topic and said, “That’s perfect!” I love talking about Failure and mistakes! I have a whole presentation about it, and I’m hoping to make a series of blog posts about it very soon.
You do not learn from success in life; you learn from failure. I hope you are making lots of mistakes so that you can learn!
Read on for a story from Pat around creating a trigger and not realizing the consequences. This is why we don’t let just anybody have mogwais triggers.
Steve Jones wraps up another T-SQL Tuesday:
Last week I asked you to write about SQL Server 2025 and what things you might be looking forward to in the new version.
Read on for seven entries from some of the more frequent T-SQL Tuesday contributors. Which doesn’t include me, because I am a slacker.
Comments closedDeb Melkin is looking forward to a pair of features:
When I look at this release, I feel like I’ve been more tuned into what’s coming out than any other. I’m still not sure how that happened. But I think overall it’s a good thing because there really is a lot being packed into this release. If you’re just trying to figure out now, you’re already behind.
There are really 2 features that I’m really excited about:
Read on to learn more about both of them.
Comments closedSteve Jones notes one interesting change to backups in SQL Server 2025:
I’ve been a DBA (or Ops manager) for quite a bit of my career, and one of the things I’ve thought was top priority was backups. I always want to be sure I have a recovery strategy, because if I don’t, nothing matters. Things go wrong and systems fail and I need to protect systems.
Security is a close second, but backups really matter.
Something else backup-related that Steve doesn’t mention is the new form of backup compression using ZSTD. Initial testing of this has been fairly positive and I think it’s worth trying it out as well.
Comments closedChad Callihan is excited about a limitation:
I had written most of this blog post before seeing this month’s T-SQL Tuesday invite. I decided to hold off a few days to post because, while it’s no secret, I think it’s worth pointing out to those that may not know: before you spend time testing SQL Server 2025, make sure you consider what version of Developer Edition to use.
You may read that and ask, “What do you mean? Isn’t there only one Developer Edition?” That used to be the case, but not anymore.
Read on to see why this is important for a large number of companies.
Comments closedHowever, SQL Server 2025 does bring some great options for doing fuzzy string matches, making custom Data Quality options even richer. I’ve spoken about this at some user groups recently (including tomorrow, remotely for TriPASS, and in a few weeks in Melbourne and Sydney for Difinity), and in that session I go much deeper into how I see data matching going. I’ll also write more about these methods in future posts, but it’ll take a few posts, covering quite a few sub-topics.
If you want to see that session, our user group (the Triangle Area SQL Server Users Group) is hosting it Wednesday morning Australia time, or this evening US Eastern Standard Time.
Comments closedSteve Jones says better late than never:
I hosted this month, late as it turns out, but we still had a few entries. Here’s a look at the blogs people published.
Read on for links to the half-dozen entrants this month, who talked about string parsing in SQL Server.
Comments closedLucas Kartawidjaja gives us a blast from the past:
When dealing with data inside SQL Server, especially when it’s delimited by a clear separator character, earlier versions (before SQL Server 2016) required us to write custom parsing functions—either as T-SQL user-defined functions or CLR functions. Starting with SQL Server 2016, we can use the built-in STRING_SPLIT() function to handle most of these tasks.
However, more often than not, we need to parse data that resides outside SQL Server—for example, in log files, CSV data, or other data sources. For these cases, I often use Microsoft Log Parser, a free command-line tool available here.
Click through for a demonstration of how it works. Or a reminder, if you’ve been in the business for a long long time.
Comments closedCourtney Woolum splits a string:
If you’ve escaped string parsing thus far, count thyself lucky. I’ve seen some numbing scripts from pre-SQL Server 2016 when STRING_SPLIT was introduced. I think the fact this month’s T-SQL Tuesday is entirely on string parsing says enough about how many ways there are to paint this particular cat.
In the post, Courtney mentions learning early on to avoid using the APPLY operator. I want to have harsh words with whoever taught her that. Purposefully avoiding the APPLY operator artificially hamstrings your ability to write effective T-SQL code.
Comments closed