Being a Woman in the SQL Community

In celebration of Women’s History Month starting next week, I was asked to write this blog about my experiences as a woman in the SQL Community, and it really got me thinking. At first, I thought I should be very politically correct and only talk about the great stuff and hype up all wonderful experiences I’ve had but then I thought that wouldn’t give a true picture. So, I am writing this as openly and honestly as I can. Here it goes. The Ugly I am going to start with the negatives to get those out of the way and… Continue Reading

Upcoming International Speaking Engagements

I am very excited and fortunate to be chosen to speak at both SQLBits and DataGrillen this year. These two conferences are incredible community run events and if you can attend either of them, I would highly recommend it.  Here’s a little bit about each event and information on how you can register. If you can attend be sure to check out my sessions. SQLBits SQLBits the largest SQL Server conference in Europe, being held in London England March 31st– April 4th. It is a conference for leading data professionals with over 200 sessions from speakers all over the world.… Continue Reading

String Split Function in SQL Server

Did you know that a native STRING_SPLIT function built into SQL Server was added into SQL Server 2016? As a consultant I see so much code that call out to a scalar function that are used to split out string delimited variables into a usable list. For those that use this method I suggest you look at this function. STRING_SPLIT is a table valued function that returns a single column of your string values split out by the delimiter. This is an unusual bit of T-SQL, in that compatibility level 130 or higher is required for its use (Microsoft didn’t… Continue Reading