It’s been about a month now since I joined the team at BlueMetal Architects. Since the consulting series has gone so well and the feedback has been really good, I thought this would be the perfect time to extend that series and get a view into a great consulting company. The last month has done nothing but solidify the fact that joining BlueMetal was, to say the least, a great decision.

This is day seven of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at constraints SQL Server supports the following types of constraints: NOT NULL, CHECK, UNIQUE, PRIMARY KEY and FOREIGN KEY. Using constraints is preferred to using DML Triggers, rules, and defaults. The query optimizer will also use constraint definitions to build high-performance query execution plans. When I interview people, I always ask how you can make sure only values between 0 and 9 are allowed in an integer column.

The Successful Consulting Series is a set of articles that are being written to both, help decisions on joining the consulting field and also, help existing consultants in their professional development initiatives. Please visit, “Successful Consulting Series” for a full listing of each part in this series.  Oh man, this is a tough one! A really really tough one, I struggle with this all the time. I am a mom, have 2 kids ages 7 and 4.

This is day six of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at standardized naming conventions and other conventions that you should standardize as well. Every company needs to have standards that developers need to follow in order to make maintenance easier down the road. There are several things that you can standardize on, here are just a few: The naming of objects

This is day five of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at why you need to be able to write your own DDL statements. Read the following two lines, have you ever answered that or has anyone every answered that when asked this question? Question: How do you add a primary key to a table? Answer: I click on the yellow key icon in SSMS!

Scalability is easy, provided you don’t need it to work. Probably the number one failure of system scaling is when people dive right in and start building. No baselines, limited measurements, no analysis, just a hypothesis and a whole lot of late nights tweaking the system. With extra complexity comes extra costs, from the initial development through more expensive maintenance. Scale poorly and not only do we take on those extra complexity costs, but also the more obvious additional costs of the actual implementation (new servers, more resources, etc).

I had to deploy a user defined function I was given yesterday, when I tried to I got the following error Msg 6850, Level 16, State 1, Procedure fnGetBooks, Line 8 Column name ‘TEXT()’ contains an invalid XML identifier as required by FOR XML; ‘(’(0x0028) is the first character at fault. The function looked a little like this one CREATE FUNCTION fnGetBooks (@AuthorID INT) RETURNS VARCHAR(8000) AS BEGIN DECLARE @BookList VARCHAR(8000) SELECT @BookList =( SELECT BookName + ', ' AS [TEXT()] FROM Books WHERE AuthorID = @AuthorID AND BookName IS NOT NULL ORDER BY BookName FOR XML PATH('') ) RETURN LEFT(@BookList,(LEN(@BookList) -1)) END GO Trying to run that will give you the same error.

The Successful Consulting Series is a set of articles that are being written to both, help decisions on joining the consulting field and also, help existing consultants in their professional development initiatives. Please visit, “Successful Consulting Series” for a full listing of each part in this series.  One of the hardest barriers to get beyond in consulting, and technology, is the task of not overcomplicating a situation and thus causing a stressful situation.

This is day four of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at triggers. Triggers are a great way to keep your database in a consistent state. There are two types of triggers, DML triggers and DLL triggers. DML triggers respond to Data Manipulation Statements (Insert, Delete, Update) DDL triggers respond to Data Definition Language events. Some things that DML triggers are used for:

The Successful Consulting Series is a set of articles that are being written to both, help decisions on joining the consulting field and also, help existing consultants in their professional development initiatives. Please visit, “Successful Consulting Series” for a full listing of each part in this series. As a consultant working independently or for a consulting company, expenses can be one of the hardest and most easily forgotten aspects to managing yourself.