Database

For a while now, I’ve been putting off a task to configure a sync process for a particular piece of enterprise data. This data is populated into a single table in a production environment on a nightly basis but also needed to be synced down into the test and development environments every now and then. Without going into too much detail about the nature of the data, it consists of about 700,000 records which change either via updates or insertions. Normally I don’t like taking production data do...

Today I had cause to take a slightly different direction with a database that had stood for many years providing a fairly critical business function. The change of direction involved dropping a few columns out of a core table with references across an unknown number of procedures and views. What could go wrong?! Let me start by saying that whilst I spend a lot of time in SQL Server, I’m no DBA and there may well be easier ways of doing this, but in years gone by I would have kicked off by tra...

Who remembers what it was like to build web apps on a shared development server? I mean the model where developers huddled around shared drives mapped to the same UNC path and worked on the same set of files with reckless abandon then fired them up in the browser right off the same sever. Maybe this is an entirely foreign concept to you but I certainly have vivid memories from the late 90s of building classic ASP apps (ye olde VB script) in Dreamweaver, side by side my fellow developers working...

I’m a big fan of Red Gate’s SQL Source Control [http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Source_Control/index.htm], I really am. I raved about it [https://www.troyhunt.com/2010/07/rocking-your-sql-source-control-world.html] earlier in the year and I still think it’s the best solution going for getting your databases under source control with Subversion. However, I’ve hit a glitch which unless I’m wrong, appears to be a bit of a design flaw; versioning changes in case. Let’s say I have a table, crea...

I knew it was going to be good before even seeing it. After all, SQL Source Control [http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql_source_control/index.htm] is from the guys who brought us SQL Compare [http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Compare/index.htm] and Data compare [http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Data_Compare/index.htm], two of my all-time favourite tools in the “stuff that would be a real pain to do without” category. They’re tools I tend to berate developers for not having and have regul...