Quick heads-up on a recently published article I did for SQLTeam.com. The article examines SQL Server Integration Services' Fuzzy-Lookup transformation for use in data-cleansing routines. If you're interested, head over to the article - there's even a sample app you can use to take a quick look at how easy SSIS makes it to add robust ...

If you're in to SQL Server Reporting Services, but want better/richer functionality in Word and Excel - then zip out and skim my article at the ASPAlliance: Using SoftArtisans' OfficeWriter with SQL Server Reporting Services 2005. The article provides an overview of what OfficeWriter brings to the table, and includes a number of ...

I love PostXING - now I've just configured it to work with the CS 2.0 upgrade that just happened on SqlAdvice. (I'm actually using the latest version of PostXING - right out of SVN - but it's working great, and setup was a breeze.) Setup was simple. I just put in my username and password, pointed the host at sqladvice.com, and ...

VPN Software should come with big warning labels: ''WARNING: Does not play well with others.''As a consultant I frequently need to gain access to remote networks via VPN. This means I'm frequently hosing myself by installing yet another VPN client. That, and I hate connecting to the vast majority of VPNs because they hose my network settings ...

As a consultant, it's not uncommon for me to need to rewrite a poorly performing query or sproc without a full understanding of the underlying biz rules or context. Improved performance is the stated goal, but data fidelity is implied as critical. Enter unit testing - something many of us rely upon heavily during 'normal' development at ...

So, your application was a success. You're getting oodles and oodles of traffic. Only, it's building up faster than you had anticipated, and after a bit of calculation, you've determined that if the present trends persist, you'll have 24 TB of data within 1 year. Only, you really don't need data > 3 months old in the main OLTP ...

Clustering is just plain fun. Being able walk around with a clustered system on my laptop (and trusty, portable, external USB HD sidekick) is a total hoot. To get an entire cluster working on VMWare 5.0 can be a bit of a bear though, because there's really a paucity of documentation out there that explains how to do it. The biggest ...

In a previous life (actually two previous lives), I was a production DBA. One of the environments that I inherited had some ... issues. There were a number of Clustered SQL Server installations -- oodles of hardware, all churning to keep product inventory, customer information, and catalog browsing going for a number of web farms for a ...

Forcing your connections to SQL Server to use Named-Pipes is actually a pretty simple operation. The problem is that it's almost a secret how to do it as so few people are acquaintd with how to do it. (Forcing it can sometimes be helpfull if you are trying to troubleshoot/diagnose connection issues, or if you are trying to force it for firewall ...

Here's one that I run into every once in a while (posted here for anyone who may be able to benefit from it in the future). As cool as CONVERT is, with all of its options for formatting dates/times, it's missing one rather large-ish formatting option: the ability to express a time (or datetime) as just an time with AM/PM designations, instead of ...