I’m a big fan of Redgate SQL Compare but it’s been good to see the arrival of a few free alternatives. Life previous to these tools really does seem like the stone age now eliminating those "oh $h**, I forgot about that!" moments. I’d always go for Redgate every time but, if you don’t have [...]

TwitterCounter is a service that provides Twitter user statistics. In their own words; “The TwitterCounter API allows you to retrieve everything TwitterCounter knows about a certain Twitter username.” TwitterCounter basically provides statistics on followers and predictions on growth. The next version of Tweet-SQL will include a procedure to work with this data. Here’s how you [...]

To get your point across on Twitter you sometimes have to try and shorten your tweets. This can be a pain for anyone over 30 who doesn’t know txtspk. Thankfully some clever chap has come to the rescue with TweetShrink and I’ve integrated it into Tweet-SQL. Here’s how you use it;

?View Code TSQLDECLARE @shrunk VARCHAR(140),
@shaved [...]

Tweet-SQL version 2 supports the new Twitter social graph API methods. These are two very simple methods to get all of your followers, or friends, Twitter user ids. There are four procedures in Tweet-SQL that support these methods.

tweet_sog_followers – Returns the ids of the authenticating users followers or, if a non-null value is supplied [...]

Using the new version of Tweet-SQL you can consume data from the Twitter Search API. The data in Twitter Search is constantly updated with new tweets so anything you grab out of the API is near real-time. To perform a query with Tweet-SQL run the following T-SQL;

?View Code TSQLEXEC dbo.tweet_src_search ‘MC Frontalot’, null, null;

Data from [...]

As every post to Twitter is limited to 140 characters it’s important we are able to squeeze as much as we can out of it. To help users of Tweet-SQL with this I’ve integrated TinyURL into version 2 of the product. Here’s how you use it;

?View Code TSQLDECLARE @long_url NVARCHAR(1000),
@short_url NVARCHAR(100);
 
SET @long_url = [...]

BIDSHelper
Enhances and extends the functionality of BIDS. I’ve mainly used this with SSIS but there are many tools for SSAS and SSRS included in the package. Two of my favourites include the variable editor (useful when you add them in the wrong scope) and the deployment wizard. These two things alone have probably saved me [...]

Tweet-SQL is a Twitter Client for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and above allowing you to interact with the Twitter API with standard T-SQL. The forthcoming version 2 of Tweet-SQL contains a host of new features and improvements. Here’s a sneak peek at what is coming in Tweet-SQL V2;

New procedure allowing the use of the Twitter [...]

Ping-SQL allows you to play with the Ping.fm API with standard T-SQL in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and above. Ping-SQL includes procedures to programmatically adjust configuration, replicate data to local tables and, of course, interact directly with the ping.fm API. Here’s a quick summary of the procedures currently in the suite…

Procedure

Classification

Comment

ping_cfg_debug

Configuration

Allows you to avoid posting test [...]