Category: Tech and Learning

SSMS regular expressions: format text into a block

Post author By Jen McCown
Post date April 7, 2015
Categories In Dev, sqlserverpedia-syndication, SSC, Tech and Learning, Tips
3 Comments on SSMS regular expressions: format text into a block

Sean’s RegEx for DBAs class must be finally sinking in for me. Today I was able to figure out a RegEx thing in SQL Server Management Studio. Here’s the problem: Sometimes I document an SP in MS Word, then copy-paste the paragraph into a comment block in the SP. Of course, when I do this, the paragraph is in […]

“Thing IS NOT NULL” isn’t the same as “Thing != NULL”

Post author By Jen McCown
Post date March 16, 2015
Categories In Applied SQL, Beginner, Dev, sql server, sqlserverpedia-syndication, SSC, Tech and Learning, TSQL
15 Comments on “Thing IS NOT NULL” isn’t the same as “Thing != NULL”

I’ve talked about NULLs before. (Ref: Here’s a bit on ISNULL(), and here’s one about understanding NULL at a basic level.) And yet, it’s worthwhile to bring these things up from time to time. “[Thing] != NULL” is nonsense. It won’t work the way you want it to work, because NULL literally means “unknown”. Nothing in the […]

Powershell to Robocopy files (say, to back up your computer to protect against CryptoWall trojan)

Post author By Jen McCown
Post date February 7, 2015
Categories In Admin, Powershell, sqlserverpedia-syndication, SSC, Tech and Learning, Tips
5 Comments on Powershell to Robocopy files (say, to back up your computer to protect against CryptoWall trojan)

We were having a good time on DBAs@Midnight, when Sean got a weird pop up message that said all his files were encrypted, and he has to pay a large amount of money via Bitcoin to get the encryption key. The show quickly ground to a halt as he, then he and Freddie, then all […]