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Last fall, I took and passed the microsoft 70-761 and 70-762 exams to achieve MCSA (Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate) status for sql server 2016.

I’m planning to take the next step this spring, to MCSE. Achieving MCSE certification consists of taking one exam after achieving MCSA. The exam options are listed here.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/mcse-data-management-analytics.aspx…

I’ve been looking into table partitioning as a way to manage large historical tables. The idea is to be able to keep the size of the table reasonably static as new rows are inserted by removing older rows. My goal is to avoid unnecessary locking. Typically I might write a stored procedure that does something like this:
1) insert new …

Recently I had a need to assign a user DBO to all databases on a server.

I put this script together, it seems to do the trick.

declare @login varchar(255)='testuser'

declare @databasename varchar(255),
		@sql varchar(max)

declare xcn cursor fast_forward local for 
select
	a.name
from
	sys.sysdatabases a
where
	a.dbid4
order by 
	a.name

open xcn

fetch next from xcn into @databasename

SQL Server supports SQL Mail for email notifications, and traditionally I’ve used SQL Mail to keep myself apprised of various server issues.

Slack is a great alternative to email, and a lot of folks make extensive use of slack. I thought it would be nice to receive notifications from SQL Server in a slack channel, and so started looking into …

One of the things that I really like about Microsoft products (and one of the reasons for their success) is the very well documented and very capable APIs that Microsoft provides. Dynamics is no exception.

Here are some helpful links that describe how to access the Microsoft Dynamics APIs, if you wish to create applications that query or report on …

I’ve been doing quite a lot of work with C# reflection recently. Reflection is nifty stuff. It’s cool to have code that can inspect itself, execute itself dynamically.

I’ve been using reflection to create applications that use “plug-ins”. For example, the user might have a management GUI that allows them to select one of several similar but not identical assemblies. …


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I love how easy it is to use HTML5 for animation. Recently I discovered another cool feature of the HTML5 graphics API: Clipping.

Clipping is a little like photoshop paths. You use the HTML5 api to draw shapes and then you can use clipping to show content only inside the boundaries of that path.

In a …

Not all programming work requires the same set of aptitudes and skills. Here is my take at some groupings:

• Systems. This is the black art of developing software drivers or other software that requires an intimate knowledge of hardware or operating systems. Testing can be very difficult to do and is often a large part of the overall scope