By Rainer Stropek on 10/3/2007

This blog describes how you can execute a control flow action depending on a certain condition (e.g. you want to execute a certain step only if a table is empty). Read More »

By Rainer Stropek on 8/20/2007

A few days ago a customer told me that he has a problem when updating an Oracle table through a linked server in SQL 2005. In this blog I want to offer a possible solution for that problem. Read More »

By Rainer Stropek on 6/20/2007

In my last DWH project at mondi business paper, a worldwide acting company in the paper industrie, I had the need to build a high-end solution for the process of putting new releases of parts of the DWH in production. In this blog I want to describe the solution I implemented. Read More »

By Rainer Stropek on 5/10/2007

There are some queries in SQL Server that I write every week and I find them very useful. In this blog I want to start a collection of useful SQL commands. Hopefully you can use them, too. Read More »

By Rainer Stropek on 4/26/2007

Foreign keys just cost performance and INNER JOINS are always better than OUTER JOINS. Is that true?? Read More »

By Rainer Stropek on 4/19/2007

A field report about the results of enabling the VarDecimal Storage Format Option in SQL 2005 Read More »

By Rainer Stropek on 3/19/2007

In my SQL Server 2005 session at the Microsoft Big>Days 2007, I show how easy it is to handle SMS or email messages in SQL Server. I use SQLCLR to write a table valued function (TVF) that returns all emails from a POP account. Read More »

By Rainer Stropek on 2/17/2007

Using "select *" in views is sometimes useful if you want to make sure that all columns of an underlying table are included in your view's result. However, it can lead to very nasty errors that are hard to find. Read More »

By Rainer Stropek on 10/9/2006

Todays I had the situation that the performance of a SQL Server 2005 (with SP1) at one of my customers was very poor. It took minutes to start SQL Mgmt. Studio, opening a SSIS package was endlessly slow, etc. After some hours of research we found out that the problem was the update of the CRL (Certificate Revokation List). Read More »

By Rainer Stropek on 6/19/2006

If running on SQL Server SAP claims codepage SQL_Latin1_General_CP850_BIN. If you want to transfer data from a SAP DB Server into your e. g. data warehouse server which uses SQL Server's standard collation Latin1_General_CI_AS it will probably not work correctly without changing some configuration options. My article tells you more about how to solve this problem without loosing performance. Read More »