Snow snow snow!
A rare snowfall hit Wellington, New Zealand, turning the neighbourhood into a winter wonderland and making for an interesting motorbike commute.
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T-SQL Tuesday #21 - Temporarily permanent hacks
Common DBA shortcuts that become permanent tech debt: temporary logging tables, backup table copies, hard-coded values, and scheduled job sprawl.
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Multiple CTE gotcha
A subtle SQL Server gotcha where referencing the wrong CTE in a chain silently skips intermediate steps, producing fast but incorrect results.
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Full-Text Search Operators – Part 4: Wrapping it up
The final part of a series on building a T-SQL Google-like search handler for SQL Server full-text, covering the NEAR operator and command assembly.
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Benchmarking I/O: The test rig
A PowerShell and SQL Server test rig for benchmarking I/O performance across different storage platforms like SAN, SSD, and local disk.
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Full-Text Search Operators – Part 3: Splitting the search string
Part 3 of the Full-Text Search Operators series: splitting a search string into classified terms using CTEs in SQL Server.
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Look where you want to go
A motorcycle riding lesson applied to SQL Server troubleshooting: avoid target fixation and look for alternative paths around stubborn problems.
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Full-Text Search Operators – Part 2: Replacing alternate operators
Part 2 of the T-SQL full-text search series, replacing alternate operator symbols like |, &, and - with normalized text placeholders.
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Removing accented and illegal characters from a string
A T-SQL function that strips illegal characters from strings and replaces accented letters with their plain equivalents for search cleanup.
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Full-Text Search Operators – Part 1: Cleaning up parentheses in a string
Part 1 of building a T-SQL Boolean search parser for SQL Server full-text search, covering parentheses validation and cleanup.
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