VisualCV

Every professional must have a resume.  Most of the resumes I have reviewed in the IT world have been lack luster at best, and these are the ones which make it through HR.  One of the problems I had at the beginning of my career was that my resume would be spun up one night after work when I decided I wanted something more.  Each time would be a new resume, new format, complete rewrite from the ground up.  This method was error prone, time consuming and generally demoralizing.  Over time I have learned to continuously update my resume every few months with the latest projects I have been working on.  My resume is now ready to go at a moments notice.  Even though I am continuously tweaking my resume in its current format, I am always looking for ways to

Temporal Tables

Temporal tables, or system-versioned tables are new to SQL SERVER 2016 and are a way to have access to all of the history of a table.  In small databases or for tables where rows are rarely updated this feature is a beautiful thing and will soon find its way into many best practices.  To get started, simply right mouse on tables > New > Temporal Table > System-Versioned Table...

When creating a new Temporal Table, you are provided a template to generate the new table.  The first section of the given template is for dropping the table if it already exists.  Since this is a new table we can skip this part and go to the create table section.  *Remember, System versioning must be set to off in order to drop the table.
The second section of the template is for creating the system versioned temporal table. In order for a table to become a system versioned temporal table, we must have a Primary Key and 2 datetime2 colums.   The with clause of the create table statement turns system versioning on and defines the history table.

TFS - SSRS

The last 2 posts have seen use use TFS to build and deploy database models and SSIS packages.  http://sqljoel.blogspot.com/2017/07/tfs-ssis.html

We are now going to turn our focus to SSRS.  Just like applications, database models and SSIS our reports should get the same attention to detail when it comes to version control.  Here we will build and deploy our SSRS reports through TFS.  For ease of deployment, I have build a seperate project for each folder I want to see on our SSRS Server.  Just as we had done with SSIS, when building our solution, we will need to use a command line task.  We will call the devenv.com with the switches to /rebuild our solution.