Now that all my server are SQL Server 2008 I use SSMS with SSMS Toolpack and Toad. I don't really use Query Analyzer anymore. The other day I found out that you can hide objects you don't want to see in SSMS by using filters.

Let's first look at some code. Create a new database named test, create a new schema named Denis and then add 3 tables to the dbo schema and 3 tables to the Denis schema. Just run the code below

Did you know that Windows 7 has a GodMode? What GodMode does is enable you to have a place where you can get to all the settings without having to browse around and click through options and folders in control panel.

Add a new folder to your desktop and name it GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

After that is done you will see the following icon on your desktop

Now when you cli...

Best Practice: coding SQL Server triggers for multi-row operations

There are many forum posts where people code triggers but these triggers are coded incorrectly because they don't account for multi-row operations. A trigger fires per batch not per row, if you are lucky you will get an error...if you are not lucky you will not get an error but it might take a while before you notice that you are missing a whole bunch of data

Let's take a look, first create these two tables

The CSS SQL Server Engineers have posted an interesting post, I myself don't have any of the fake identity columns but I did many times suggest in newsgroups to use UPDLOCK and HOLDLOCK in a transaction to guarantee that 2 inserts would not generate the same key value. This stuff below is from the CSS SQL Server Engineers post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2009/10/26/reduce-locking-and-other-needs-when-updating-data-better-performance.aspx

This was asked on twitter recently and I gave the answer there. I decided to write a blog post about this because I can use over 140 charaters here instead.

You will see the Cannot resolve collation conflict for equal to operation error when you try to join 2 tables. let's take a look at what we need to do to resolve this. First create and populate these two tables