It's intellisense for SQL Server Anyone who has ever worked with me heard me speak, or read any of writings knows that I am a HUGE fan of Reflector. By extension, I am a big fan of Red - Gate I have recently begun exploring some of their other offerings and came across this jewel. SQL Prompt is a plug in for Visual Studio and SQL Server Management Studio. It provides several tools to make dealing with SQL a little easier for your friendly neighborhood developer. When you a query window in a database,...

SQL Tips for Learning a new Database The hardest part of writing SQL statements is in understanding the database that you are working with. The raw mechanics of SQL for the most part are fairly straight forward. Often times really complex SQL statements point to business logic showing up where it doesn’t belong. The hard part about learning a database is the lack of consistency and documentation. Data diagrams are often of little help. Diagrams are good for an overview and to get a list of tables,...

Have you ever been struck with a table design that did not work well for what you now needed? Sure, we all have. One common scenario is to have a table where all of the data that you need is in multiple records, but you need it returned in a single record. A common solution is to join the table to itself multiple times. Depending on the size of the table, this might work. Sadly this approach does not scale well. A more scalable solution would be to use grouping logic to get all of the data in a single...