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SQL - Error Handling

2011-08-11T01:00:28Z

Yet another “new” feature of MS SQL 05 is an often overlooked “error handling”. The Transact-SQL Try…Catch is designed to operate similar to the exception handler in the Visual/.NET languages- if an error occurs inside the TRY block of a query, control is passed to another group of statements that is enclosed in a CATCH block (and on)…

SQL - The Power of APPLY

2011-07-07T01:10:24Z

MS SQL 2005 and up adds support for the APPLY clause, which, in turn, lets you join a table to any dynamic sets, such as table-valued-functions or even derived tables. While we can argue over the benefits and dangers of the latter (another set of article perhaps?), being able to do things more than one way is certainly always awesome.

IA Summit 2011: Friday (1 of 3)

2011-05-08T19:17:37Z

IA Summit 2011 was a huge success. The sessions focused on improving skill sets, analytics, cognitive persuasion, holistic experience, and the new world order- helping Information Architects “play nice” and coexist with the rest of the workforce in an agile environment. Each and every world-famous host and attendee worked on helping each other, and me personally, get closer to the acme of perfection. My most humble appreciation goes to Justin Davis, Eric Reiss, Jonathon Colman, Louis Rosenfeld, and the rest of the presenters who also found time for personal attention…
It is hard to summarize the amazing and already succinct presentations, let alone great hallway discussions we had, but I have to try, out of mere respect and, if for nothing else, to persuade you to read more about their respective slides and websites.
Consider these to be simple “notes”- some paraphrasing might occur, and the message coming from me could really be erroneous altogether, but by all means, please, disagree and go read the originals…

SQL Server Search

2011-03-25T23:30:13Z

What do you do if you need to find a certain string used in a stored procedure? What if you need to be completely certain that you can remove the object and there are no dependencies within the server itself? There are a number of 3rd party tools that allow searching within the SQL Server database schemas, but some are slow due to precaching and some are simply not powerful enough due to lack of options. SQL itself comes to the rescue!

SQL - The Danger of NULLs

2011-02-15T00:40:08Z

Following up on the previous article SQL – The Power of NULLs, here are some of the things to keep in mind when you do decide to use NULL in your work.