Custom SQL Stored Procedure Best Practices Analyzer - SQL Cop, Maybe?

Recently, I moved to Seattle as a Data Architect for a product our company was developing. I also started taking up most of the DBX roles in that project.

Though our architecture is predominantly CRUD based and we have our in-house CRUD proc generator, some business logic invariably seeps into the SPs. And we had let it to the discretion of the developers on whether to do the processing at Data or the Business Layer. I thought it would make sense to keep a rudimentary check on what logic was going into the SP and make sure our developers don't misuse the liberty and continue to follow the guidelines defined.

Read more »

Object Oriented SQL Programming with SQL Server 2005

In this post, I have attempted a crude implementation of Object Oriented SQL Programming using the APPLY operator in SQL Server 2005. I feel that giving some thought in these lines, we can bring in more flexibility, abstraction and reusability to the way we query the database and, may be, create a new style for data access.

There is only one rule that I am going to follow here. All table access will be done using an INLINE TABLE VALUED function. No query will directly access the table. I would like to illustrate it with a small example.

Read more »

Recursive Self Join - A futile endeavor!!

This post is just a walkthrough of my attempt to come up with an elegant solution in SQL Server 2005 to a (yet) seemingly impossible problem. I don't really know if I am trying to reinvent the wheel but I did realise that the approach I followed was terribly flawed.


What I wanted (and yet want) to achieve might be best explained with an example. Take the table Employees in the Northwind database. With the recursive common table expressions in SQL Server 2005, I can get all the subordinates of an employee (say employeeID = 2) with this query.

Read more »

Templates in SQL Server

I asked a few of my colleagues whether they knew that there were templates in SQL Server. Their responses were typically either "Is it?" or "Yeah. Saw it once when I was trying to create a new query. So?"

When Microsoft tries to pack in so many features into SQL Server 2005 aimed at improving the life of developers, why haven't they done much on the templates, which I feel, is a powerful tool for speeding up the development process.

Read more »

Next version of SQL Server - Wish List

This is from the Dark Omni :) Just thinking out loud what all I would like to have in the next version of SQL Server. This is in no particular order and some might seem totally impossible to implement and some, downright stupid. But, I leave the decision to Microsoft. They are the ones who often yell "SURPRISE!!!"

Read more »