If you have two columns in a table that "remember" their old values in two different historical tables, as it is the case in AdventureWorks with EmployeePayHistory and EmployeeDepartmentHistory, you may need (or just wonder how) to merge these two tables  Read more

Today I ran into a nice problem with SQL Server fancy way of sorting GUIDS. I know, there should be no reason at all to sort GUID columns but, if what you need is run two tables side by side to check whether they are aligned or not (this is the task of  Read more

Sometimes I need to have a huge table to make performance tests and I want to create the table easily. I found a simple way of producing these test data using CTE in a creative way and decided to post it so I can have it at hand when needed and maybe  Read more

In a previous post I showed how to make bulk insert faster using SSIS. During Sql Server Conference 2007 I had the great opportunity to double check it with Stefano Stefani that analyzed the problem in greater detail and finally came up with both an explanation  Read more

I have been so used to use int identity fields as primary key for any table and to believe it’s the fastest way to define a clustered primary key that I never thought this can cause serious performance problems to SSIS. Until I tested it and discovered  Read more

I love VISIO to make database modeling, it gives very nice and colorful diagrams that I use for the documentation. I hate VISIO as it is really far from perfect, among all the others one thing it lacks is the ability to generate a database using SCHEMA  Read more

SqlBulkTool is a command line utility that is used to quickly create a mirror of a database. It reads its configuration from an XML file containing source and destination command strings and a list of all the tables to mirror and then handles the work  Read more

TableDifference has been updated to version 1.1. The major improvement is the fact that now TableDifference can handle a field as Key : a field that represent a key in the table, you must supply KeyOrder Compare : a field that is to be compared between  Read more

In SSIS the SCD component does a lot of work for you but it works so slowly that it is quite always convenient to create an “ad hoc” solution to handle the slowly changing dimensions. As the main problem is that of determining the difference between the  Read more