February’s #meme15 is on Linkedin and how we use it. The meme15 concept came from one of my good friends, Jason Strate (Twitter | Blog). The monthly topics focus on professional development, blogging and really, why we do these things to help ourselves and others. I have always been an abuser of all the social networking tools that are available. I use them to my advantage to promote myself and my career. Realistically, no one will know about you beyond past, current employers and interviews unless we take advantage of these tools.

It’s time for #meme15 – Jason Strate’s (twitter | blog) monthly blogging topic. This month, he wants to know, “Why and how you use LinkedIn?” In a discussion at work this week, we agreed that no one knows how to use LinkedIn – even LinkedIn. Is it for people to connect with other professionals? For companies to post jobs? For people to join and post to groups? I just realized today that posts to groups now have a “Like” button. I’ve referred to it as “Facebook for professionals, minus the pictures”, but I didn’t realize it had gone that far.

I saw a tweet tonight from Julie Smith (Twitter | Blog) about SQL Saturday #111 Atlanta. The tweet was referring to the pre-conference sessions that this event is supporting the day before the event, April Friday 13th, 2012. OK, all fun aside about the fact these speakers have to do sessions on Friday the 13th, the pre-cons that are listed are nothing short of invaluable. SSIS – The mentors of the mentors The tweet itself refers to the pre-con that is being done on SSIS. Of course, SSIS is a side mistress of mine and I can’t get enough of it. The power it can yield is just another extension of what we have in an overall high-quality and complete package called, SQL Server. Pre-cons are training sessions that are a little different than the actual SQL Saturday sessions. They are paid for by the attendees, but you get a full day of training on a particular topic. Now, that doesn’t take anything away from SQL Saturday session layouts. I’ve received more information from one Andy Leonard SSIS session in an hour at a SQL Saturday than I have in a month of SSIS poking around and reading. Yes, there is great return of investment even in a free event! Keep in mind the fact that I just said I learned that much in an hour from Andy Leonard.

A common pattern that I use in creating ajaxy applications is to return a small HTML fragment from the request, and then inject this fragment into the DOM in the callback executed after a successful request. This tends to be a bit simpler than returning JSON and picking it apart to update the page, but it has one major problem, at least when using normal forms authentication. If the user gets logged out (either by logging out from another tab or an expiring session), the AJAX request gets redirected to the login page, which is then returned and inserted into the page. You can see how hideous this can become in the picture below.

I find the whole tabexpansion thing in powershell intriguing and I was especially interested in what posh-git did. Since I wanted to use that in my own scripts too. To be clear tabexpansion is when you type something and then do tab and the IDE tries to figure out what comes next. Like that. That’s cool, since us old people are not good at remembering things so we need these kinds of things to help us.

This article will show you how to use two methods in order to restrict the amount of data that is needed in a Merge Replication setup: Join and Parameterized Filters. Join Filters are exactly what they sound like. If a Join Filter is configured in a publication, the publication acts almost exactly as a join in a T-SQL query would. The tables are joined on key columns and the data is thus filtered down through the tables.

There are several considerations when deciding if your Merge Replication setup is in need of an article that uses Row-Level Tracking or Column-Level Tracking. The primary considerations will be the business needs and overall data retention needs. Can you allow subscriber data to be lost if it is not the last updated data? At the highest level, Row-Level Tracking is performed based on a datetime column and determining if the row has a conflict, and using the date column to determine resolution based on a resolver. Column-Level will allow conflict resolution based on a date column using a resolver, as well as a merge aspect of the column level changes by both Publisher and Subscriber. Aside from the business, from a DBA’s perspective, performance will be a factor in deciding which setting to use on an article. Although the base decision will always be determined by what the business application dictates, performance considerations may direct development to other integration aspects that are considered acceptable data merging practices for the given business rules.

The cloud just got a whole lot cheaper for SQL Azure customers To meet evolving customer needs across both ends of the database size spectrum, Microsoft announced that they are lowering the price of SQL Azure and introducing a 100MB database option at $5 per month. Customers will realize 48% to 75% savings for databases larger than 1GB. The 100MB DB option enables customers to get started using SQL Azure at half of the previous price

If you want to see what parameters a stored procedure is using then you can accomplish this in a couple of different ways. You can use sys.parameters or INFORMATION_SCHEMA.parameters from within SQL Server itself, you can also SqlCommandBuilder from within ADO.NET Let’s say you have a procedure name prTest in a database named Test2 CREATE PROCEDURE prTest @id int,@SomeDate date,@Somechar CHAR(1) OUTPUT AS SELECT GETDATE(),@id ,@SomeDate ,@Somechar Here is how you would do it with c# and ADO.NET

We are interviewing for some SQL developer positions and it seems that most people that I interviewed the past 3 weeks do not know the difference between a full outer join and a cross join. Cross join A cross join produces the Cartesian product of the tables involved in the join. The size of a Cartesian product result set is the number of rows in the first table multiplied by the number of rows in the second table