Data Engineer and Nerd
This month’s invitation from Garry asks us to talk about what SQL related end of year activities we have to look forward to. Garry has included a few typical DBA examples such as archiving or purging out old data, or updating calendars such as dimension tables or even partition schemes for the new year to come. However […]
Continuing with our recent theme of partitioning I wanted to make sure that we looked at one of my personal favourite features – Partition Switching. Partition Switching is the ability to switch an entire partition of data from one table to another almost instantly. Where it gets interesting is that this is the same operation […]
Last time out, following up to our posts looking at an introduction to partitioning and how to implement it we started to look at how to manage partitions. In this post we’ll continue that theme by looking at how we’d go about removing (or merging) partitions as well as covering some general considerations when we’re performing operations on partitions and […]
Last time out we tried our hand at implementing partitioning on a table with some data inside it. We looked at creating the partition function, followed by the partition scheme, and then applied that to our table and looked at the results. Following up on that I now wanted to look at how we can manage […]
A little while back we looked at an introduction to table partitioning where we covered the concepts involved in the partitioning. This time out we’ll look at how to implement those concepts to create a partitioned table. As we’re going through the motions for this let’s start off by creating a table and fill it with some […]
This month’s invitation from Tom Zika asks us to consider production code and consider what quality makes the code ‘production grade’. It’s interesting to think about all of the areas we may want to consider before putting some code into production – has it been reviewed, has it gone through sufficient testing, does it perform well […]
A few weeks back we looked at altering an object inside our database and changing the schema in which it resides. Whilst the ALTER SCHEMA … TRANSFER statement itself is straightforward, there are some gotchas you might find as a result of the change which I thought it was worth covering. To set up for what we’re going […]
Last time out we looked at referencing tables across databases. While we of course have the option of using three-part naming to address the table, we also considered views and synonyms as two alternative options. Both of these can be used to achieve similar results. There are elements which they have in common and others which […]
In SQL Server we’ll typically end up using environments containing multiple databases which happen to have data which relate to each other. Due to this there will be times when we’ll need to reference objects in another database when writing a query. What options do we have for doing this? Here we’ll look at three […]
This months’ invitation from Steve Jones asks us to write about producing SQL dynamically in some form or another. We can create and execute SQL dynamically within our procedures but what about dynamically creating it from other sources before passing it into SQL Server? The quick I have to admit that Steve’s mention of using Excel […]
Andy Brownsword 