21Mar 2011 by Grant Fritchey 10 Comments

Communication

Object Relational Mapping, SQL Server, T-SQL, Tools, Visual Studio
It sure seems like there’s a lot of miscommunication between developers and database specialists. In fact, the communication can become so poor that outright hostility between the groups is common. At the end of the day we are all working towards a common goal, to add value to whatever organization we are working for. It's a shame that we all lose sight of this commonality and create such a false dichotomy between the groups. I think there are some ways that we, as database specialists, can use to attempt to cross that gap. Prior to being suborned to the dark side, I was a developer. I had a little over 10 years experience working in VB, Java & C#. I remember, distinctly, cursing our database team for being so problematic…
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13Jul 2010 by Grant Fritchey 10 Comments

Red Gate SQL Source Control

SQL Server, T-SQL, Tools
You just have to love Red Gate tools. They find the small area that they want to cover and then they cover it extremely well. I rave regularly about SQL Prompt and SQL Compare and SQL Search (free one, btw). I've got SQL Data Compare and SQL Data Generator open & working on my desk regularly. I'm dabbling in their other tools fairly often as well. I just like Red Gate tools. I guess my constant & consistent praise is why I'm a "Friend of Red Gate." I like to mention that before I start praising their tools some more, just so no one thinks I'm hiding it. Why would I hide it? I'm proud to say it. I am a Friend of Red Gate! ... anyway... where was I... right, new software.…
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21Mar 2008 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Top vs. Max

T-SQL
The company I work for has a very well defined need for versioned data. In a lot of instances, we don't do updates, we do inserts. That means that you have to have mechanisms for storing the data that enables you to pull out the latest version of all the data or a particular version of all the data, or the data at a particular moment in time, regardless of version.  That means maintaining a version table and a series of inserts into various tables. Some tables will have pretty much a new row for each version, some tables may only have one or two versions out of a chain. With the help of a very smart Microsoft consultant, Bill Sulcius, we have a mechanism that works very well. However,…
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