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; [...]

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 [...]

Here are a few Powershell nuggets for beginners to digest. First thing that might trip you up is the Execution Policy built into Powershell. I’ve turned this off on my development machine but it’s obviously advised to have it enabled on production machines. That aside, it’s easy to turn off… If you’re using Vista you [...]

I read a great article, by Pinal Dave, on SQL Joins  this week. I thought I’d add something for Non-SELECT joins as I’ve noticed a few developers missing these in their armoury. It doesn’t help that there is no standard so every database implements this differently. This is one of the few occasions where you [...]

SSIS can offer you more than just simple ETL. Even though I dislike VB.Net its inclusion in SSIS allows you to do virtually anything you can think of. I’ve used SSIS for testing other bits of software, categorising keyword and search terms, and monitoring Windows Servers with WMI. SSIS comes with a lot in the [...]

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 [...]

Not many people seem to be aware of the WITH TIES clause introduced in SQL Server 2005+. This simple feature is worth adding to your query armoury. In the words of BOL WITH TIES… “Specifies that additional rows be returned from the base result set with the same value in the ORDER BY columns appearing [...]

The requirement to work with postcodes, and specifically London postcode districts, has followed me around during my professional life. Below is a TSQL script to create a table for the postal districts in London. Enjoy! ?View Code TSQLCREATE TABLE london_postcodes (postcode VARCHAR(4) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED) GO   SET NOCOUNT ON; SET XACT_ABORT ON; [...]