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In future, more and more solutions will have data that is not stored directly in a SQL database but rather in cloud EAV (Entity Attribute Value) data stores, caches, client storage, document databases and so on.  Usually it is the existing DBA’s and other SQL biased database experts that are the custodians of corporate data and, in general, ...

Jamie and I gave presentations last night at the London SQL Server users group.  It was a good evening but I think I managed to upset about half the people there.  I suppose when your first two slides are these… …then you can expect a bit of an uphill battle. But, the other half seemed to enjoy it, and besides, if I am not pissing ...

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 ...

When the SQL CLR, a technology enabling .net assemblies to be called from within SQL Server, was released in 2005 a collective gasp went up from DBAs all around the world.  And rightly so, the idea that developers would be writing rogue little .net apps than run inside the database is worrying - DBAs wouldn't be able to scrutinise the code ...

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 ...

There is some literature out there that says it is possible to impersonate the current user’s logon for external access (file system, registry, etc.) in SQL/CLR sprocs, but not much in the way of sample code.  As I have crossed this bridge, I thought I should share the knowledge.  This now works with assemblies catalogued as ...