Author Archives: Stefan

How long do the parts of my job take?

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Stefan

When you schedule a job in SQL Server, you can see how long the job took by right clicking on the job and then clicking View History. If you want to see how long each step in the job took, … Continue reading →

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Stored Procedures don’t necessarily stop at an error

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Stefan

I normally expect precedence to save me in my stored procedures. If I have six statements and the third ones fails, I expect the fourth through sixth not to run. Boy, was I wrong. Normally I test my stored procedures … Continue reading →

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Send Text notifications

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Stefan

I have most of my jobs set up to email me either when they fail or when they complete, depending on how sensitive the job is. If I need to know it is taking too long, I set it up … Continue reading →

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A weird result from IN (SELECT

Posted on June 29, 2011 by Stefan

I was recently building a query that referenced a SQL Server 2000 database on a linked server. I’m using SQL Server 2008 R2 on my end and I’m used to Intellisense suggesting the columns in the table I’m querying. Unfortunately, … Continue reading →

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Who’s data is it?

Posted on June 23, 2011 by Stefan

Recently I needed to import some data from a flatfile into SQL Server. As I was creating the table for it, I tried to determine what the data actually was. There wasn’t very good documentation for it so I played … Continue reading →

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Oracle to SQL Server

Posted on June 12, 2011 by Stefan

It can be hard getting back to blogging after some time off, but here goes. I moved in March/April and I’ll be unpacking for a long time, but I do want to be blogging it is just hard to find … Continue reading →

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Tool Choice

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Stefan

I’ve been wanting to set up a portion of my site as a shared repository for my friends and I to post recipes and talk about cooking. My immediate thought was to use a wiki because wikis are all about … Continue reading →

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Database Design

Posted on December 5, 2010 by Stefan

One of the things I like best about working with computers is designing systems, whether that’s programs, databases, interfaces or all three and more. Lately I’ve been working primarily on databases and I thought I’d talk a little about database … Continue reading →

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Column Naming

Posted on November 4, 2010 by Stefan

When you’re designing your tables it is important to keep track of the names you’re using for the columns. Don’t just name the ID columns ID. Name them so you’ll know what table the ID belongs to. For example, if … Continue reading →

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Redundancy

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Stefan

There are certain types of redundancy that are good in the IT world: Backups, failover servers, recovery plans and the like. Most redundancy however, is bad. In the programming world, bad redundancy comes in the form of repeated code instead … Continue reading →

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