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Looking Forward 100 Months (T-SQL Tuesday #100): The Roundup
Great news for those of us who plan to stick around the data realm for a few more years: Things are looking pretty good in 2026!I asked T-SQL Tuesday #100 participants to take a speculative view on the world 100 months from now. 32 people weighed in—in some form or another—and produced a set...
T-SQL Tuesday #200 (v1.0): Last of the DBAs
8:22 a.m. It was a dark and stormy night.Well, not so much, though Mike’s excruciating hangover was making him wish otherwise. The early morning sun shone brilliantly in through the office window, punctuating the headache that even four ibuprofen pills simply refused to touch. Sure, that hangover “miracle cure” medicine had come out last...
Invitation: T-SQL Tuesday #100 – Looking Forward 100 Months
Just over eight years ago I decided to try an experiment: Set up a roaming blog event for the SQL Server world. I was hopeful that it would catch on; I even prefixed the number one with two zeroes in anticipation of someday, maybe, hopefully filling in all three spaces. But honestly, 100 months?...
The Career Influence of Usenet Strangers (T-SQL Tuesday #096)
A freshly minted Computer Science graduate at the tail end of the dot-com era, I had three basic requirements for my first job: (1) money; (2) money; (3) more money. (I was going to be a millionaire, don't you know!) So I did pretty much the same thing as all of my friends: got...
Playing the Third-Party Recruiter Game (T-SQL Tuesday #093)
Finding a new job can be a long and stressful proposition. This holds true even for skilled candidates. And even for skilled candidates in an atmosphere like we have in 2017—in which everyone who is employable is, for the most part, employed, and IT positions often stay open for months due to a lack...
The SQL Hall of Shame
SQL Server is a big product, with lots of features. Many of the features—hopefully the vast majority of them—are solid and allow us to build trustworthy, secure, and reasonably usable database applications. But nearly everyone has stumbled into a few, shall we say, “darker areas” of the product now and again. Strange and seemingly...
The Guru (T-SQL Tuesday #089)
I became a consultant a bit earlier in my career than was probably wise. The going was rough at first, with periods of feast and periods of famine. Although I had several clients, I didn’t understand how to sell services or schedule my workload, and so I’d wind up either doing huge amounts of...
Solving the Net Changes Problem with Temporal Tables (T-SQL Tuesday #087)
SQL Server 2008 was perhaps not the meatiest of SQL Server releases, but it did have one especially promising feature: Data change detection. Or maybe two features, depending on how you look at things. I’m talking, of course, about the almost confusingly similarly named Change Data Capture and Change Tracking.
Change Data Capture was the...
SQL Server 2016 “Hidden Gems” – Now on a YouTube Near You
Sad that you missed last week's SQL Server 2016 "Hidden Gems" GroupBy session?
Unlikely, perhaps...but no worries either way! It's now available for free, on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4608MNM-QU
Enjoy!
SQL Server 2016 “Hidden Gems” Resources
Today I was honored to present my SQL Server 2016 “Hidden Gems” talk for the GroupBy online conference.
The slide deck and demos are attached to this post.
Following are some links to help you in further exploration of the various features I discussed:
STRING_SPLIT
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt684588.aspx
Aaron Bertrand’s performance tests: https://sqlperformance.com/2016/03/sql-server-2016/string-split
Session Context
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt605113.aspx
Time Zone Support
sys.time_zone_info: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt612790.aspx
AT TIME ZONE: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt612795.aspx
HASHBYTES
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174415.aspx
Session Wait...