Welcome to EMC Consulting Blogs

In October 2009 I created 2 codeplex projects which I would to tell you about: SQL Server Reporting Services MSBuild Tasks (ssrsmsbuildtasks) A few years ago I created some tasks for MSBuild to help deploy reports for my project, details can be found here,  since then my tasks have been re-used in a few other projects within my ...

With direct access to relational databases being marginalised we need to question the next evolution of ORMs.  Now our architectures have to be more considerate of other ways accessing data as relational models hide behind services, sit on the cloud or are even replaced with non-relational storage. I have been involved in, and a spectator ...

I have been working on a project which made use of the spatial data type geography within SQL Server 2008. An issue that I had was how to load the geography data from a KML file into SQL Server 2008. Currently there is no out of the box tools to do this. There is a 3rd party tool, Safe FME, which offer either their own tool or components which ...

I have a requirement, for service broker endpoints and queues, to automate the creation of a certificate on one server and load them up on another.  The manual way of doing this is something like this: 1. Use CREATE CERTIFICATE to create a self signed certificate, something like: CREATE CERTIFICATE SomeCertificateA WITH ...

First of all I'd like to assure non-developers accidentally reading this post that it has nothing to do with lysergic acid diethylamide, an A-class substance commonly known as LSD or ''acid''. It's all about ACID properties of database transactions in general (boring stuff), and the ''I'' property and scalability in particular. Now that we ...

SQL Server 2008 is upon us and if there is one feature about which I am somewhat excited (sad geek, I know) is the plethora of new data types designed purely to store dates and times. To explain the reasons for this excitement let me just list the problems with existing SQL types. The first major issue is that of resolution: Smalldatetime has ...

So I just got back from TechEd Barcelona, and I had a great conference in no small part due to the people I went with: Merrick Chaffer, James Dawson and Paul McMillan. This is a selection of some of Conchango's finest from the world of .Net development, infrastructure and SQL Server. One of the reasons the conference was so much more enjoyable ...

For my current project I have inherited a couple of customized RMO applications. They help to create the merge publication, publication snapshots, subscribers, subscribers snapshot and synchronization sessions.  When it became time to use the application on a Windows 2003 64 bit server I came across a couple of issues when trying to ...

I’ve just gone through an informal and limited evaluation process for a charting tool for a BI dashboard.  It included some of the RS extension products, ProClarity and ChartFX.  Of course I would have been keen to use ProClarity, but in this case the cost was a little high and, to be honest, it would have been a sledgehammer to ...

I wrote an article for the September 2006 issue of SQL Server Standard magazine:   The version that was finally published was a very cut down version with minimal code snippets.  This was for obvious reasons; they had to fit the content onto small columns in the magazine.  For the readers who would prefer the more verbose ...