So I need to import data from Excel into SQL Server. I whip up a new table, knock out a quick package, run the package, and look at the data. Looks fine, okay. Email the customer so they can look at the table. Two days later I get the email from the customer saying, “How [...]
Some food for thought when working with NULL values. select count(*) from ps_dwsa_prog_dtl COUNT(*) ———- 657662 1 row selected select count(*) from ps_dwsa_prog_dtl where acad_sub_plan =’13′ COUNT(*) ———- 13 1 row selected select count(*) from ps_dwsa_prog_dtl where acad_sub_plan ’13′ COUNT(*) ———- 148559 1 row selected select count(*) from ps_dwsa_prog_dtl where acad_sub_plan is null COUNT(*) ———- [...]
Actually, I’m not at the office, but I am doing what I would consider “work” today. I’m at the TDWI World Conference in Orlando. Today I attended Stephen Brobst’s class on “Designing a High Performance Data Warehouse”. While the course came highly recommended, I was somewhat skeptical going in that, being software agnostic, it would [...]
Starting with release 10g, Oracle is phasing out Long fields. I have two words about this: Thank God! Long fields are an ETL nightmare. You can’t use any string functions on them. The OLEDB/ODBC drivers can’t read them. If you’re a PeopleSoft developer and you’re thinking about creating a LONG field, ask yourself if it’s [...]
This seems to happen all the time: somebody writes some bad SQL on our SQL Server box and all the sudden our tempdb grows to the point where it’s taking up an entire job. Solution: create a job that checks the file size of tempdb. If it reaches a certain threshold, run the following command: [...]
With the upcoming release of SQL 2005, .NET 2.0, and Visual Studio 2005; Microsoft has set-up a forum for community support. I like the idea. I’ve never felt like there was a reliable source for support from the developer community that was (1) open to everyone and (2) regularly monitored by experts. One of the [...]