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 […]
Read MoreThis 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 […]
Read MoreI 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 […]
Read MoreHad 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 […]
Read MoreJust 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 […]
Read MoreI 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 […]
Read MoreJust 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 […]
Read MoreA 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; […]
Read MoreI 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 […]
Read MoreThere 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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