I recently found myself with a situation in SQL Server where I had a string consisting of a series of values (constructed using the CLR function for concatenating values that I wrote about last week) that I needed to reverse.  Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as using SQL Server’s built-in REVERSE function.  That actually reverses each individual character in a string, rather than switching the order of words.

I’ve had my fair share of issues with my broadband connection since signing up with O2 (provided by Be There) 3 years ago. Fortunately, it’s improved a great deal over that time and is now extremely stable. The biggest problem I had was playing online via Xbox LIVE, especially getting my Network Address Translation (NAT) settings right on the supplied O2 Wireless Box II (essentially a rebranded Thomson-Alcatel TG585v7).

One of the good things about SQL Server (as with most other Microsoft products) is that there are often multiple ways to achieve a single result.  One such example is the concatenation of cell values from multiple rows into a single, delimited string.

For those out there who like to use Yahoo’s Site Explorer to investigate the Yahoo index and mange their sites, the day you’ve been dreading has arrived.

In my free time lately I’ve been getting into the superb online multi-player in EA and DICE’s Call of Duty baiter, Battlefield 3 on Xbox 360.  For anyone who’s not tried the series, it’s a large scale multi-player military shooter with wide open maps and a variety of land, sea and air vehicles with which to play.  While it’s enormous fun, especially if your fellow players work as a team it’s unfortunately riddled with game-breaking bugs.  Some players seem worse affected than others and the issues seem to be spread across all three of the game’s platforms; Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC.

If you’re a reasonably social media-savvy person, you’ll no doubt have heard of (and perhaps used) Klout, an innovative online service for measuring online influence via social media.  Klout’s unique selling point is their own calculation of influence, the Klout Score.  While it’s not exactly new to the social sphere, having been on the go in some shape or form since 2008, Klout have recently been engaging in a substantial push to increase the scope of their offering by adding many more social networks and features.

I recently encountered a scenario where I wanted to display my report content in the form of a multi-column list. In essence, I was looking to create the SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) equivalent of an ASP.NET Repeater, to render my report content both horizontally and vertically (in this case a dynamically repeated SubReport) a number of times dictated by my source dataset. I spent a little bit of time investigating some more complicated possibilities such as building a matrix of row and column groupings when the solution finally hit me. It is simply brilliant in its simplicity. Here’s how to do it.

Far too long ago, I posted part 1 of an article solving the import of large data files with varying columns using SQL Server integration Services (SSIS).  This is the belated follow up.  In part 1, I explained some example file structures and how we approach the problem of inserting these files, which all have a varying number of columns with different data types.   The solution combines a mixture of SSIS script tasks, external C# code in a referenced DLL and a flexible SQL Server DB schema.  This post will walkthrough my overall SSIS Control Flow, as well as detail how we translate a code based, dynamic object model into something well-defined which we can insert into a SQL Server DB.