Programmer's Edge

SSIS Row Comparison By Checksum

I recently ran across an SSIS package that needed to be rewritten that included the Checksum Transformation from SQLIS.com . The main reason was that they wanted the removal of the component because they were using it to compare rows instead of using something like a Slowly Changing Dimension Transformation

Business

The Future of Bitcoin?

A lot of press has been made of Bitcoin in the last few years, but what exactly is the phenomenon and how could or would it affect the way that we handle transactions? Background For the uninitiated. Bitcoin is a form of cryptocurrency … or more plainly stated, it’

Administration

Warning! Latest Windows 8 updates and SSD Acceleration!

So last night upon returning home, I found one of my super machines wanting to be restarted so that it could start to apply a batch of Windows 8 updates to it. This particular machine is one of the Z series motherboards which uses an SSD card as a cache

Databases

SSIS Execute SQL Task : Mapping Parameters And Result Sets

A very common scenario in an ETL process is one in which you need to call out to some configuration tables to figure out some values that it needs to use somewhere downstream in the process. Quite often you also want to pass in some parameters as well. So in

Business

Capitalism Works! Even for Hackers?

InfoWorld is finally reporting on a rather disheartening trend that I have watched over the past year or so, which is the rise of the consumer black markets for malware. That’s right, just when you thought that those wily hackers couldn’t get any worse, they have

Cloud

Use Your Azure Settings!

A lot of times you are used to creating your connection strings and important app settings in your web.config file. However, what happens when you are creating a worker process that you don’t necessarily have a config file for? What if you wanted to update a value

Cloud

Microsoft Announces New Pricing for Azure SQL Reporting Services

Microsoft announced earlier this month that they were changing the way Azure SQL Reporting was being charged. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/02/01/sql-reporting-services-pricing-update.aspx I believe this is due in large part to a lot of pressure from the general public that they were&

Databases

Fear Not the Mighty TRIM() Function!

Jason Strate wrote up an excellent blog post dealing with the people asking for SQL Server to have a TRIM() function in addition to the LTRIM() and RTRIM() function and the possibility of performance issues creeping up. You can check out his post below: PLEASE, NO TRIM()? Jason

Development

Silverlight : Hooking up a Default Button Action

One of the typical things that you may want to accomplish on a particular UI implementation in Silverlight is to have a default button that is triggered through the use of the enter key. For this Silverlight provides support UI Automation through a set of peer classes that derive from

Development

BlogEngine.NET Settings Not Saving With Values Other Than Text

You may be using BlogEngine.NET 2.7 for your blogging solution like I am and have run into a rather sticky situation in which Settings values from non scalar entities are not saving the values of properties if they are anything other than text properties. This was a little

Administration

Review: Samsung 840 Series 250GB Sata III Solid State Drive

In order to be a little more productive at work, I decided that it was high time that I switched out my older 500GB mechanical hard drive with an SSD. My old setup was utilizing a Hitatchi 500GB internal hard drive. Nothing fancy but it had finally gotten to the

Community

#SQLSat SQL Saturday Indianapolis Sponsorship Opportunity!

It’s almost here! One more month to go until SQL Saturday #126 is finally here. On Jul 28th,2012 Indianapolis will be hosting an all day event of approximately 250+ developers and database administrators at the University of Indianapolis. There are still sponsorship slots available for company&

Databases

SQL Server 2012 Firestarter Series Recordings!

Sorry for the delay everyone. Looks like my blog had an issue with pre-scheduled postings. Below you can find the links to all of the recordings from our SQL Server 2012 Firestarter Series just in case you missed them. I will be updating the posting here to keep

Databases

Chicago SQL Connections Talk: Auditing Using SQL Audit in SQL Server 2008 R2

Thanks to everyone that attended the presentation last night! It was really great to have everyone there and engaged in the conversation. Also great to see some old comrades as well. Below you will find the link to my slides and the content from the presentation. Remember that some of

Databases

PTI SQL Server 2012 Firestarter Webcast Series

Well, PTI is ramping up for the release of SQL Server 2012 which is coming out the first half of this year and in order to help get the community up to speed we are putting on TWO MONTHS worth of weekly webcasts based on all of the new goodies

Development

Simple WPF: ListBox Items Stretching To Fill Width

Here’s a fairly common question that can be solved fairly easily. Sometimes when you have a ListBox of Items you would like for those items to stretch the available width of the ListBox. Sounds pretty straightforward right? Given we have something similar to the below XAML : <ListBox x:

Community

#SQLSat87 Louisville Recap

Another SQL Saturday weekend has come and gone. This time it was SQL Saturday #87 in Louisville, KY . The event appeared to be pretty well packed, Malathi Mahadevan ( @sqlmal | Malathi’s Blog ) and crew pulled off another awesome event! Hopefully most people around the area got to

Administration

Hyper-V Guest Drops Network Connection

I am in the process of setting up a new server…pretty much a fairly decent sized box that will house a new Hyper-V setup. The large red-glowey thing on the end is supposed to replace a half dozen smaller machines I have laying around and has the capacity

Development

Work Smarter Not Harder! Silverlight with Caliburn.Micro

Thanks for everyone that attended the webinar. Pragmatic Works should have the video up by the end of the week. I know that we obviously wen a little long and I don’t think I answered everyone’s questions so feel free to hit me up here or via Twitter

Databases

Swan Dive Into Filtered Indexes and Statistics

Thanks to everyone that attended the session. It was great getting a lot of good questions. As promised, here are the slides and the scripts for everything. Please make sure to visit http://www.pragmaticworks.com cause they are the ones that provided the opportunity for you to get some

Development

Simple VS2010 Tool O’ The Day

Okay so just a quick post here to give some kudos to Skybladev2 for developing this cool little add-in that replaces the default C# outline behavior to allow it to add outlining for all braces {} in your code. I found it a little annoying the other day when I couldn&

Community

#SQLSat82 Indianapolis: Post-Mortem

Well, another SQL Saturday is in the books. This time I was speaking at our own SQL Saturday #82 in Indianapolis, IN. Being our first SQL Saturday event the pressure was on to produce a top-tier event for both speakers and attendees alike. Luckily, my parent company Perpetual Technologies, Inc

Development

#Telerik: Mastering the WPF RadWindow Dialog Boxes

RadWindow within the Telerik toolkit is an awesome resource for creating stylish windows. However, it also has the added benefit of providing you with some out-of-the-box implementations of dialog boxes. Specifically it comes with three separate ones.. Alert Confirm Prompt These are useful because they are already templated out with

Development

Code Smarter Not Harder #3: #CodeRush Property Setter Template for #CaliburnMicro

In our third installment, we will look at the latest version of CodeRush and how we can implement a custom template for Caliburn.Micro that takes care of a custom property setter for us. Now in the latest version of CodeRush there is already a template created fro MVVM implementations

Community

#SQLSat82 SQL Server Troubleshooting & Performance Tuning : DON’T Miss a Golden Opportunity!

SQL Saturday #82 is having an all day pre-conference event at Perpetual Technologies, Inc headquarters building. This is a once in a lifetime opprotunity for you to get a full day of training given by one of the premier SQL Server experts in the field, Kevin Kline of Quest ( blog