Regular expressions (or simply regex for short) have long been used by system administrators and data professionals for searching and manipulating text. Regular expressions allow the user to find, replace, and manipulate text based on the pattern they define in the expression. While every text editor allows simple search-and-replace capabilities, regex allows for searching for partial matches, using wildcards, and…

I’m a creature of habit. With the software tools that I use, I like to have everything in the same place every time, even if I’m working on a machine I don’t normally use. That’s especially true with SQL Server Management Studio, where the sheer number of buttons and options can force one to hunt for the feature they need….

Did you know that SQL Server Management Studio can help you arrange your SQL scripts into logical groupings? SSMS includes the ability to associate multiple code files together into projects for better clarity and ease of maintenance. In this post, I’ll show you the basics of SQL Server Management Studio script projects. SQL Server Management Studio Script Projects For those…

Occasionally, I’ll stumble across one of those neat tricks that makes me ask myself, “Why didn’t I know about this years ago?”. This was one such discovery, and has been a huge time saver for me. Vertical Text Selection in SSMS Typically, selecting blocks of text is done in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom order. If you use your mouse to select…

I’m old enough to remember when multitasking was considered a good thing. From the same mouths that brought you “work smarter, not harder” came the advice to always be working on multiple things at once to improve efficiency. However, we’ve since learned that deep focus is more serial than parallel, and that trying to focus on multiple things at once…