Anyone diffing two versions of an SSIS package sees change markers scattered across the XML even for a trivial rename — eight “changed regions” in this article’s example, and the diff doesn’t even attribute the rename to the right task. The same modification in a stored procedure shows a three-line diff and is reviewable in … Read more
A SQL Server Agent job that needs to read a CSV file from a file share fails with Access is denied — the agent’s service account has no permission on that share. Instead of piling ever more rights onto the service account, the job step switches identity: impersonation at runtime, configured in SQL Server Agent through a proxy. One limit … Read more
Read a CSV file, transform the data, load the result into SQL Server: for the file part, SSIS is the obvious choice, for the transformation pure T-SQL. The best solution is often a combination of both. There is no single right way, but there are three decision criteria against which every concrete choice should be … Read more
Anyone who writes a 200-line SELECT with a recursive CTE understands it completely while writing it — and three weeks later, not a word of it. Inline comments are the safety net against that. The problem: placed badly, they destroy the very readability they are meant to preserve. What this article covers: Prerequisite: The examples run against AdventureWorksDW2017 (table [dbo].[DimEmployee], a … Read more
An SSIS package fails, and the execution log is supposed to point to the cause. Instead it presents a tree in which the tasks do not appear in the order they ran, but alphabetically by name. For complex packages that log becomes plainly unreadable. The good news is that a well-considered naming convention makes it … Read more
If you can’t tell at a glance where the WHERE clause of a 200-line SELECT statement starts and ends, you have a structure problem — not a content problem. This article shows how to format SQL statements so that SELECT, FROM, WHERE and JOIN stay immediately recognizable even in long queries. → Part of a series. This is part 2 and covers statement structure (SELECT, WHERE, FROM, JOIN). The basics for … Read more
Anyone who has ever had to debug a badly or completely unformatted SELECT with 30 columns and half a dozen joins knows the feeling: it isn’t the SQL that eats up your day — it’s hunting down what the statement is actually trying to do. SQL formatting isn’t a matter of taste; it’s a maintenance … Read more
A SQL statement that looks neatly indented on one developer’s machine collapses into a staircase on a colleague’s — even though nobody touched the code. The culprit is almost always a difference in editor settings: a different tab width, tabs instead of spaces, a non-monospaced font. Readable SQL code in a team doesn’t start with … Read more
A complex SQL statement is hard enough to read on its own — shifting coding styles in the same file turn every line into an extra re-orientation task. SQL formatting is therefore a team responsibility, not a personal matter of taste. At a glance: Prerequisites: SQL Server or Postgres — the series was written in 2018 with … Read more
Anyone who has ever debugged a 200-line SELECT without indentation knows: SQL formatting is more than a matter of taste. Readable code isn’t just easier to understand — with the right editor tools, it’s also much faster to refactor. In this article: Prerequisite: SSMS serves as the example editor; the principles apply to any editor with … Read more
