What is the most efficient, least intrusive, way of getting table row counts (say, for keeping periodic statistics)? Select(*) is accurate. Using index statistics is instant but the statistics could be out of date. dm_db_index_physical_stats Dynamic management view. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188917.aspx … Continue reading →
For ease of maintenance all object permissions should be granted to SQL Server roles and users simply made members of one role or another. If you’re using SSDT, roles assigned to users don’t work at all well. I find it … Continue reading →
Column Naming Convention I like lower case with underscores: company_id, first_name, telephone_nbr, booking_ref This is Uncle Joe Celko’s convention as stated in SQL Programming Style (Morgan Kaufmann, 2005), and I accept his justification that Invoices.invoice_nbr is more readable than Invoices.InvoiceNbr in a dense melee of … Continue reading →
It’s a familiar situation: your email address columns contain phone numbers, important notes, credit card details… It’s not a problem until you want to use the addresses in bulk – such as for a mailshot – and by that time … Continue reading →
This is the error handler created E. Sommarskog, with some slight alterations by me. See http://www.sommarskog.se/error-handling-I.html. ERROR_HandleCaughtError stored procedure This is ES’s error handler in a form that suits me: I usually want to add some additional information to aid … Continue reading →
I imagine that it’s a well trodden path seeking out a satisfactory code or syntax highlighter for wordpress. You can, just about, paste colour-formatted code from some editors into the wp text editor (e.g. SSMS to Outlook Email to WordPress), … Continue reading →
I have twice now been wrong-footed by this SQL Server error message: “Microsoft SQL Server Native Client 10.0” Hresult: 0x80040E07 Description: “Conversion failed when converting the varchar value ‘abcd123’ to data type int.”. The statement causing this distress was: ISNULL(View1.long_name, View1.short_name) AS output_column … Continue reading →