byrmol Blog

Garbage

How to be a good DBA

Love: A good DBA loves his data and DBMS. And like any good relationship, they communicate with each other SQL Server: “What a day! “ DBA: “What happened? “ Read more →

How the Universe really began…

Before time, space and matter, there was the infinite nameless one.. CREATE TABLE TheInfiniteOne(Name VARCHAR(?) PRIMARY KEY, CHECK COUNT(*) = 1) INSERT TheInfiniteOne (Name) VALUES ('Nameless') It was an impossible relation of course because time did not exist. Read more →

Determining RI Sequence

My project is getting ready to roll, so data versioning has commenced.. Backup, restore, BCP etc... Digging around in the toolkit, I dredge up an old procedure I wrote for load/unload in version 7. Read more →

SQL_Variant.. Finally a use for it…

The “object” type of SQL Server is hardly used and with good reason. RDBMS are meant to be “strongly typed“.. it is the foundation of the domain/type concept. RDBMS : “What are you INSERTing Dave? Read more →

Optimiser Magic

A “well done“ to the boys and girls who code the SQL Server optimser is a bit of an understatement.  A “summarising” view I created contained 3 scalar subqueries. Working against the view, I found the optimiser ignoring (not resolving) some of the subqueries. Read more →

My poor delicate computer hands

4 blisters, 2 bits of flesh missing and 3 splinters is the inevitable consequence of manual labor when applied to computer hands. Sheds are cheapish (world steel prices jumped at the end of February), cement is not, so to cut costs I volunteered to be a concreter’s laborer for our new shed. Read more →

It's getting louder.

The marketing has cranked up a gear, which would seem to indicate they are getting a good response from the betas. Looking here (features) and here (pricing), we see 4 commercial breeds of SQL Server 2005. Read more →

Too good at SQL for a job..

The job market in Australia is pretty good at the moment for any decent programmer/DBA. After the blood letting of post 2000, many charlatans where uncovered and removed. The days of the “Database Fix“ began. Read more →

Towards a Point Array constraint

In my last blog, I asked the question for breaking 1NF for a particular situation involving Points. Graz hit the nail on the head with the question about the relevance of the internal data components to the outside world. Read more →

Should I break 1NF?

I am storing graphical objects in SQL Server. A Line, Rectangle, Ellipse, Image and Text object can all be represented spatially on the drawing surface by 2 elements StartPoint and EndPoint (Point= X INT > 0,Y INT > 0). Read more →

Go Huygens, Go!

10 hours and counting… Good luck and be nice to the inhabitants! Link Legacy Comments Brett 2005-01-21 More of Titans secrets to be unveiled on Jan. Read more →

DBAs are good

Financial, health, demographic, taxation, production, defence etc...There is some serious data out there all under the control of the men and women we call DBAs. Several years ago I remember being given a CD containing the entire electoral roll. Read more →

DBAs are evil

A long time ago just down the road, no matter who asked you your name, you always gave the same reply. " I am Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod." Read more →

Office, equipment & first scope

I am hoping this will be the first of many, but time constraints or other circumstances may alter the hope. A desk a mate of mine built, is the main workstation which is not far from the kitchen. Read more →

No place like home…

It's 2:45AM and I have been on the road for nearly 11 hours. The car is packed to and on the roof and the dogs are sleeping with one eye open. Read more →

Yukon - Is the DBMS still there?

Just about every article and blog being written on Yukon is about XML or the CLR integration. If you didn't know better, you would swear that Yukon is just a . Read more →

A few DBA Jokes - Lame factor high

1 It is March 1st and the first day of DBMS school The teacher starts off with a role call.. Teacher: Oracle? "Present sir" Teacher: DB2? "Present sir" Teacher: SQL Server? Read more →

Unique values, many NULLs - A Dodgy Constraint.

I have seen several times people requesting to place a unique constraint on a column that should allow many NULLs but only allow unique values. Personally, I have never had to implement such a constraint, and when I see the question posed I assume it is needed because of a underlying design problem. Read more →

GROUP BY DataTable Method - A SQLOps method

The Expressions that can be formulated for a calculated column in a DataTable are a very handy thing. The problem is the aggregation operators only work for a parent-child relationship. This feature really stood out when I started working with the MSDE DBMS. Read more →