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Category: Rant

Azure Data Studio is being retired and I am concerned…

Some of you may, or may not know, Microsoft announced the deprecation of the Azure Data Studio (ADS) on 06 February, with support ending next year on 28 February. For those of using ADS Microsoft recommends migrating to VSCode and using the mssql extension. Honestly, I’m really concerned about this. I tried the mssql extension for VSCode (mssql going forwards) some time ago, and compared to ADS it was incredibly feature lacking. A lot of stuff I want to do as a DBA was completely missing, so I went straight back to ADS and didn’t look back. I like ADS,…

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Welcome to 2020, may I take you coat? How about your Customer Data?

That’s right, it’s now 2020, we’re already in the 2nd decade of the “new” millennium. A lot has changed in the last 20 years: High Speed Broadband (cough for most of us) is common place, Computers are faster than ever, cars are more economical, the polar icecaps are smaller (apparently), and a Happy Meal for McDonald’s isn’t 99p any more. There are some things that haven’t change too: The UK is still part of the EU (at time of writing), your neighbour’s dog still barks all night, and customer data is still wide open to theft from SQL injection. Yes,…

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3 years later and STRING_SPLIT is still incomplete

It’s finally (more or less) complete! Well, it’s now 2022, and we can finally say that STRING_SPLIT is "complete"; or at least better (not accepting multi-character delimiters is still a problem). In Azure SQL Database, and in SQL Server 2022, STRING_SPLIT now has an optional bit parameter, enable_ordinal, which if 1 is passed to will mean that an additional column called ordinal is returned, which (unsurprisingly) returns the ordinal position of the value in the delimited list. By default, the value is 0 for the parameter, so if you did have any production code with SELECT * (though I hope…

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