Ajarn Mark Caldwell Blog

Bringing Business Sense to the IT World…

Broken Views

“SELECT *” isn’t just hazardous to performance, it can actually return blatantly wrong information. There are a number of blog posts and articles out there that actively discourage the use of the SELECT * FROM …syntax. Read more →

SQL Server Developer Tools – Codename Juneau vs. Red-Gate SQL Source Control

So how do the new SQL Server Developer Tools (previously code-named Juneau) stack up against SQL Source Control? Read on to find out. At the PASS Community Summit a couple of weeks ago, it was announced that the previously code-named Juneau software would be released under the name of SQL Server Developer Tools with the release of SQL Server 2012. Read more →

SQL Source Control with Vault Support Officially Released

HOORAY! It is officially here! Today, Red-Gate officially released SQL Source Control version 2.1 with support for Vault. While we have been happily and successfully running the beta version (a.k.a. the Early Access release) of Red-Gate SQL Source Control with support for Vault for quite a while, it is good to have the official RTM (or GOLD, or PROD, or whatever you call your “no-longer-in-beta”) release of the product. Read more →

Source Control and SQL Development – Part 3

In parts one and two of this series, I have been specifically focusing on the latest version of SQL Source Control by Red Gate Software. But I have been doing source-controlled SQL development for years, long before this product was available, and well before Microsoft came out with Database Projects for Visual Studio. Read more →

More Maintenance Plan Weirdness

I’m not a big fan of the built-in Maintenance Plan functionality in SQL Server. I like the interface in SQL 2005 better than 2000 (it looks more like building an SSIS package) but it’s still a bit of a black box. Read more →

Clean Up After Yourself

I have been editing some ASP.NET pages lately and finding a LOT of code that is either all commented out, or worse, someone created a way to permanently hide it from the user (such as ASP Panel that is never made visible) yet left all the code active. Read more →