Over the last couple of months I have on several occasions found myself in need of test data for demos, blogposts etc. You all know AdventureWorks, which will work for a lot of demoing stuff. But the amount of data is limited, and if you are demoing stu...

I have been working with SQL Server for quite a few years now, and it still happens quite often that I discover new cool things to do in t-sql. My latest discovery is not a new feature at all, because it was introduced back in SQL Server 2005 – but for ...

In this weeks blog post we will have a look at how easy it is to combine FileTables and FullText Search. Last week we had a look at some of the basics of the new FileTable feature – if you missed out on last week blog post, you can read it here – FileTa...

In a series of blog posts we will have a look at the new SQL Server 2012 table type called FileTable. This first blog post will be a simple getting started – how to create a FileTable and how to dump files into the folder and do some simple file manipul...

With SQL Server 2012 comes a new set of conversion functions, that will certainly help doing type casts and conversions in t-sql. These functions are: TRY_PARSE TRY_CONVERT PARSE TRY_PARSE() Syntax from BOL: TRY_PARSE ( string_value AS data_ty...

I’m sure that I’m not the only one with nightmares about the startup parameters in older versions of SQL Server 200x – the design and UI is just bad, it is so easy to forget a semicolon or mess up the syntax – and to end up with SQL Server that is not a...

With SQL Server 2012 a new string function is born – CONCAT(). The output is a string, as the result of the concatenation of two or more strings – if the input is another type than string a conversion will be done implicit. The CONCAT() function takes b...

Normally I’m not a big fan of using traceflags, my advice is only to use these when it is absolutely necessary otherwise don’t. Here is a list of the documented traceflags that you can use with SQL Server. That is the documented once, besides that there...

Finally it is here, the SQL Server 2012 RC0 is ready for download, click this link and you’ll be downloading the good stuff in seconds. While you are downloading, you might want to have a look at some of these links, to read the official Microsoft infor...

vanne040, Write-only indexes has no purpose at all, but they could be old indexes that were used previously. But perhaps updated application code changed the execution plan - or the data in the column is just no longer needed, and then the index is n...