When using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) you have the option of creating or maintaining tables via regular SQL DDL statements or you can use the built in Designer tool which provides a GUI interface covering a selection of the same functionality such as adding fields, changing data types, maintaining foreign keys etc. Sometimes the […]
Sometimes when you’re querying a set of data for the first time it can be tricky to understand the results you see. What are the data types? How is the data keyed? Are there any constraints in place? Does the table have foreign keys relating to other tables? So you might then end up scanning […]
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 […]
Andy Brownsword 