Today I did a clone of one of my git repositories and it took ages to download. Looking into what got downloaded it was easy to see why. The .git folder was over 500Mb in size. I know how this has happened. This repository was created in 2013 and has been used by me as a dumping ground for lots of things related to the...
Like many DBAs I spend a lot of time maintaining my SQL Server backups. From SQL Server I maintain both full backups and transaction log backups. I have often restored my full backups but until recently I have never restored a transaction log backup. All backup strategy’s are only as good as the last time you tested...
I spend a lot of my time creating new features that simplify my companies business processes. A good example of this is an invoicing system I created. Instead of users working off different spreadsheets and copying and pasting data between various different programs the user can click a couple of buttons and...
Wow! What an amazing year 2015 has been and with 2015 about to end I thought it would be good to look back at what happened in this amazing year. January I started the year with a declaration that 2015 would be my year of code. Well I have had a few breaks from programming but I have learnt loads this year. I have...
Four months ago James David Martin Foster was born. And he is even more awesome now than when he was born. As I write this James only has a few sleeps (as James sleeps multiple times in a day I can’t put an exact number) until his first Christmas. James is pretty much unaware of what is going on as he is still too...
In December we count down the days to Christmas. People often have advent calendars filled with chocolates or even Lego. But what about if you are a programmer, how can you count down the days till Christmas? What about if you had a daily Christmas themed coding challenge? Well www.adventofcode.com is the answer. Each...
The Oatmeal created a comic which you really should check out. It can be found here . The comic tells the story of a plane crash, in which the 25 year old co-pilot goes back into the burning plane to rescue passengers and lead a group of survivors through the desert to find help. The co-pilot was named Gene...
I use SQL Server Management Studio all the time for writing queries, getting data and general SQL development. I have enjoyed seeing the improvements that each new version of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) introduced. One great improvement was intellisense. This feature saves typing and reduces errors by...
Over 50% Off this Black Friday! Yes your heard it correctly even www.funkysi1701.com has amazing offers. It is like the whole world has gone “Black Friday” mad, with every company in the world offering amazing and unmissable deals. So in an attempt to cash in on all the Black Friday fuss I will write a quick blog post...
I recently read a blog post by Pinal Dave about how you can backup straight to Azure Storage. The procedure he described is only available for SQL Server 2014 or later. I won’t go into detail of this method as Pinal describes it better than I can, but the basic of it requires setting up credentials and then running a...