I am very fortunate to have been accepted as a Friend of Red Gate for a second year! If you're not familiar with "FoRG", Friends of Red Gate work with the Red Gate development and product teams to provide feedback on existing products, new tools, and feature enhancements. You can also find us speaking at …

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Earlier this year I did a post on a new method I stumbled up on for copying and pasting file paths. I thought it was a huge timesaver, and I use it multiple times daily. Judging from the reactions I got, I'd say plenty of others have found it useful as well. A few weeks ago, the folks at Webucator reached out to me, …

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Two weeks ago I decided to kick off the holiday season by asking people to write about what they were thankful for. I was very fortunate to get three great responses, which I am happy to share in no particular order (which just so happens to be the order I received them in). Chris Yates (@YatesSQL) says that after …

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I'm also grateful for my grandma's homemade gravy Back in the early days of this blog, I wrote about what I was thankful for in response to Jason Strate's post asking about it. Now, 4 years later, I am hosting a redux, and your contributions are very welcome! In looking back on the past year, I feel like I have an …

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It's almost Thanksgiving time here in the United States – that wonderful holiday where families and friends gather to share a meal and give thanks for all our many immaterial blessings. (And then for maximum irony, we head out the following day to battle each other in stores for heavily-discounted electronics while …

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My marathon week of #SQLFamily is through, and that means it's time to start writing about it! First up is Red Gate's SQL in the City in Seattle. Having been an attendee when they came to Chicago back in 2012, I was especially honored to be able to return as a presenter! SQL in the City was held at Marion Oliver McCaw …

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It's my favorite time of year again – Autumn. It gets colder, the days get shorter, leaves change colors, and there's that little annual event called PASS Summit. This year I have even more reasons to love it because I was able to work 2 more events into my trip: SQL Saturday Oregon and [Red Gate's SQL in the City][3] …

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I've been told on two occasions that the absence of the MEDIUMINT datatype is a serious shortcoming of SQL Server. If you're not familiar with MEDIUMINT, it's an integer type available in MySQL that consumes 3 Bytes and is capable of storing values ranging from -8,388,608 to 8,388,607 (signed) or from 0 to 15,777,215 …

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This month's T-SQL Tuesday (the 54th!) is brought to us by Boris Hristov (@BorisHristov), and he's asking us to write about interviews and hiring. I think many of us have at least one tale of an interview or interaction with a recruiter that's gone good, bad, or ugly. I know I've got plenty of them, two of which I've …

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This post is part of T-SQL Tuesday #52, which is being hosted this month by Michael J. Swart (@MJSwart). Michael is asking us to argue against a popular opinion, and I'm more than happy to do so, as this is a belief that I've kept to myself for quite a while. SQL Server's row compression feature can be an amazing tool. …

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