Category: Uncategorised

XQuery – Accessing the Attributes Axis
By Art on December 19, 2014

Working with a sequence of attributes in XQuery is fairly straight forward with the ‘attribute’ axis even if you don’t know or need to know the attribute names. By using this axis you can access all of the attributes within the given context node. The specific scenario I had was to find a particular duplicated node within the xml that […]

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Updated blog Site
By Art on November 12, 2014

This post is mainly to test the syndication still works correctly from my heavily updated web/blog site so apologies for the non-SQL nature of it. Finally after promising myself to do so since late 2013, I’ve actually got around to updating my blog site to the latest version of Orchard. I was running quite an old version and had to […]

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Creating cards in Trello via the REST API and parsing the returned JSON all in a SQL CLR
By Art on November 12, 2014

I recently blogged about how good I thought Trello was and shortly afterwards I found out that they did provide a full read/write RESTful API. Awesome! After a bit of thought I realised that I should be able to use the API to create new cards in Trello from within SQL by simply calling a CLR procedure and I could […]

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Drop and Recreate all Synonyms
By Art on October 27, 2014

Had a quick job the other day restoring a pair of databases under different names which is all straight forward enough, but each database in the pair uses quite a few synonyms to access objects in the other database. So with the pair of databases restored under new names, a quick script was needed to drop and recreate all the […]

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Convert UK Postcode to Latitude/Longitude/Northing/Easting using SQL CLR
By Art on September 25, 2014

Just a quick post this time. I had a requirement to convert a small number of UK based postcodes to their latitude/longitude locations so I could use that data within some Tableau dashboards that I’m working on. I had a look around to see what I could find and quickly found both sites that exposed an API to do lookups […]

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Using indexed views on ANY core SQL server edition
By Art on August 26, 2014

I was having a discussion the other day and was quite surprised to hear that there still appears to be a slight misconception regarding being able to use indexed views on web or standard editions of SQL server. As it stands the documentation clearly states that you can create and use indexed views on web, standard, BI and enterprise editions […]

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Thank You SQLBits!
By Art on July 25, 2014

Just a very quick post to say thank you to all the organisers, speakers, helpers, sponsors, venue staff, caterers, party entertainers, long suffering partners and anyone else involved with the event as it was a top, top few days. This was my 3rd SQLBits after Liverpool + Nottingham and in just this short time, it is plain to see how […]

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Time for a change in career
By Art on July 9, 2014

A few months back I made the decision to leave the relative comfort and security of my permanent role and head into the world of contracting & consulting. Whilst a big decision and change for me, it is something that I’ve long wanted to do at some point during my career when the time was right. Don’t get me wrong; […]

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Deferred-drop tipping point
By Art on May 31, 2014

I was intrigued by the deferred-drop feature that has been inside SQL since SQL Server 2000 SP3 after watching one of Paul Randal’s Pluralsight courses which was ‘Logging, Recovery and the Transaction Log’. The deferred drop feature is what allows for the seemingly instant truncation or drop of any table regardless of how big the table is. I wanted to […]

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Most important feature of SQL 2014
By Art on April 29, 2014

There are a whole raft of cool new features in 2014 including things like In-Memory OLTP, increased Azure integration/options and a new cardinality estimation design to name a few. But for me, one of the most important features in 2014 is the increase in memory that standard edition can use has been increased from 64GB to 128GB. I currently work […]

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