Stuart Gray

One of the characteristics of the training of higher-level athletes is an increase in the volume of training. This principle applies to almost all aspects of training. A recreational athlete who starts a jogging program can improve their mile time by jogging a mile a day, several times a week – to a point. A beginner in the weight room can improve their bench press max by using a 3x5 program twice a week – to a point. Eventually both the runner and the weight trainee will have to increase the amount of work they do if they want to continue producing personal bests. The question is, how do you know when you are doing too much and reaching a point of overtraining? - Stuart Gray

Every now and then you may attempt to calculate an aggregate function -- such as SUM() -- on a correlated subquery, only to encounter the following error: Msg 130, Level 15, State 1, Line 24 Cannot perform an aggregate function on an expression containing an aggregate or a subquery. This can be a tricky situation to resolve depending on how your query is structured and how complicated it is, but here's a couple of ideas to help you out. - Stuart Gray

There are many reasons you may want to ‘recover’ a password instead of resetting it. Or if you are like me, you are always interested in ‘how’ rather than ‘why’. It doesn’t really matter what your reasons are for recovering a password. What does matter is that you understand just what is involved in recovering a SQL Server login password and how you can protect yourself from a potential attack. I am not going to go into all the minor details of Microsoft’s method of protecting the SQL Server login passwords. I will instead show you how to obtain free tools from the internet that anyone can run and just how quickly you can recover a password. - Stuart Gray

Dataset contains polygons corresponding to the top level (Postcode Area) of the GB Postcode Hierarchy. - Stuart Gray

I knocked up a C# console app to: read in all the Code-Point data from the .csv files downloaded from the Ordnance Survey (approx 1.7 million rows of data) convert the Eastings/Northings to WGS84 Lat/Lon coordinates bulk load all the data to a new table in SQL Server populate a GEOGRAPHY column with the point data for each post code create a spatial index on that column - Stuart Gray

Download a list of UK out code postcodes with their latitude and longitude coordinates. - Stuart Gray

uk police stolen property disposal auction site - Stuart Gray

The last thing you want is to create something, invest in Adwords, only have your potential customers arrive non-plussed, and then navigate away, never to return again. Before you ever start coding, it’s essential that you “pop up” from the keyboard, and learn what your customers actually want to use and will pay for. That’s the hard part: learning what your customers want to pay for. The cool part: There’s actually a process you can go through to 1) target a specific customer-set, and 2) learn how to design a product that will solve their problem, and 3) become close to habit-forming. - Stuart Gray

The following fifty sixty proprietary programs are listed in no particular order within broad categories along with their open source alternatives. In some cases you could probably write your own book on frustrations with the proprietary programs shown here. In other cases, you’ll discover that the open source alternative isn’t quite up to snuff yet. And, in other cases still, you’ll learn that some proprietary programs are real gems, but that the open source advocate can replace those gems with equally shiny objects from the open source repertoire. - Stuart Gray

Cruiser is an information radiator for CruiseControl.Net with a simple but effective visualisation of your projects and their status. Designed to work at any size, Cruiser can be viewed on individual machines or on a wall-board view for your whole team that lets you see at a glance the status of your CI projects - Stuart Gray

What better way to kick off a new year than with a look back at some of the top free SQL Server tools of 2012. I know you all love talking about your favorite tools and maintenance scripts. Whether your pleasure is problem diagnosis, query tuning, index analysis or performance monitoring. These tools are all available absolutely free and with the common goal of making your life easier. In no particular order of awesomeness (they are all fantastic in their own individual way) here are my top 10 free SQL Server tools of 2012. - Stuart Gray

The most important part of documentation is starting, so I’d like to help you by giving you a list of things to document. It’s going to take time and won’t be as fun as tuning queries from 20 minutes to 2 seconds, but it could save the day sometime in the future. You can call this your SQL Server Run Book, your SQL Server Documentation, your SQL Server Best Practices Guide – whatever works for your environment. Make sure it’s filled in for each server, and kept up to date, and you’ll soon realize the benefits. - Stuart Gray

All products analysed by AV-TEST are tested in terms of their performance in the categories of Protection, Repair and Usability. This area of the website contains detailed test reports on all of the products that AV-TEST examined since July 2010. - Stuart Gray

Printable, customizable blank planners (for free!) - Stuart Gray

When people hand us a SQL Server and ask us to take it over, we need to do a fast health check. We need to put on our latex gloves, do a little poking around, and discover the dirty secrets before they catch us by surprise. That’s where our sp_Blitz™ script comes in: it helps you rapidly assess configuration, security, health, and performance issues. We organize the results in a prioritized list and give you simple explanations of each risk, plus a column of links that you can copy/paste into your browser for more information about each issue. - Stuart Gray

When people hand us a SQL Server and ask us to take it over, we need to do a fast health check. We need to put on our latex gloves, do a little poking around, and discover the dirty secrets before they catch us by surprise. That’s where our sp_Blitz™ script comes in: it helps you rapidly assess configuration, security, health, and performance issues. We organize the results in a prioritized list and give you simple explanations of each risk, plus a column of links that you can copy/paste into your browser for more information about each issue. - Stuart Gray

Latency numbers every programmer should know - Stuart Gray

Latency numbers every programmer should know - Stuart Gray

It’s easy to understand why thou­sands of developers use SimpLESS for their web projects. SimpLESS is your easy-to-use LESS CSS compiler. Available for free for mac and pc. - Stuart Gray

The dynamic stylesheet language. LESS extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations and functions. LESS runs on both the server-side (with Node.js and Rhino) or client-side (modern browsers only). - Stuart Gray

It’s easy to understand why thou­sands of developers use SimpLESS for their web projects. SimpLESS is your easy-to-use LESS CSS compiler. Available for free for mac and pc. - Stuart Gray

The dynamic stylesheet language. LESS extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations and functions. LESS runs on both the server-side (with Node.js and Rhino) or client-side (modern browsers only). - Stuart Gray

Add color to your Bootstrap site without touching a color picker - Stuart Gray

Bootstrap is an HTML5 & CSS3 framework designed to help you kickstart the development of webapps and sites. WrapBootstrap is a marketplace for premium Bootstrap themes and templates. Impress your clients and visitors while using a single, rock-solid foundation. - Stuart Gray

Add color to your Bootstrap site without touching a color picker - Stuart Gray

Bootstrap is an HTML5 & CSS3 framework designed to help you kickstart the development of webapps and sites. WrapBootstrap is a marketplace for premium Bootstrap themes and templates. Impress your clients and visitors while using a single, rock-solid foundation. - Stuart Gray

Minimum standards for de-identifying or anonymizing datasets, in order to preserve patient privacy while allowing sharing personal data from clinical trials, have been suggested by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz and colleagues in an article in the British Medical Journal. - Stuart Gray

Minimum standards for de-identifying or anonymizing datasets, in order to preserve patient privacy while allowing sharing personal data from clinical trials, have been suggested by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz and colleagues in an article in the British Medical Journal. - Stuart Gray

In the public forums for SQL Server, you often see people asking How do I use arrays in SQL Server? Or Why does SELECT * FROM tbl WHERE col IN (@list) not work? The short answer to the first question is that SQL Server does not have arrays – SQL Server has tables. However, upto SQL 2005 you could not specify a table as input to SQL Server from a client, but you had to pass a string with the values and unpack it into a table on the SQL Server end. This article describes a number of different ways to do this, both good and bad. I first give a background to the problem (including a quick solution that is good enough in many cases). I then give a brief overview over the methods, whereupon I discuss general issues that apply, no matter which method you use. Having dealt with these introductory topics, I devote the rest of the article to detailed descriptions of all methods, and I discuss their strengths and weaknesses. SQL 2008 added a new feature that evades this kind of kludge:... - Stuart Gray