We can do several things to improve the reading of tables in reports. One common trick is to have different visual treatments for alternating rows, which I call Zebra Striping. Programming it When you want to program this, the easiest way is to iterate through a collection and use the modulo operator to determine if you’re in an even or [...]

Normally when you set the Fill Factor on a index you specify the percentage of space on the page to be filled with data. So setting it to 99%, means 1% of free space remains on the pages. This is what I wanted for some tables, so I created a Maintenance Plan to be run in the weekend and went [...]

I was getting the following error with a SSIS package I deployed on the server: Failed to decrypt protected XML node “DTS:Password”. I spend a lot of time on this error, before I figured this one out. At first it wasn’t clear to who or what caused this error. After investigation I noticed the error occurred only when I added [...]

Maurice de Beijer wrote about his presentation at the SDC. I was the single person in his audience that is currently using SQL Compact. I don’t get it why people are using SQL Express on the desktop. Even Microsoft is doing it with Dynamics CRM. But do you really need the power and features of a server product? Because that [...]