When I was a kid, living in New Jersey at the time, my dad was very involved in sports car racing and motorcycles. Our garage was never used to actually park a car that we rode around in. Instead, it was strewn with all kinds of half-built engines and body parts. Car body parts, that [...]

In SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services, you can now create maps for reports using the built-in map gallery of the United States or individual states, ESRI shapefiles, or a spatial query. In a previous post, I explained how to obtain an ESRI shapefile for another country and convert it into spatial data so that [...]

I had to troubleshoot a problem with a mysterious extra page appearing in a PDF this week. My first thought was that it was likely to caused by one of the most common problems that people encounter when developing reports that eventually get rendered as PDF is getting blank pages inserted into the PDF document. [...]

A nice feature that appeared first in SQL Server 2005 (not SQL Server 2008 – I mis-remembered!) is the ability to allow the user to click a column header to sort that column. It defaults to an ascending sort first, but you can click the column again to switch to a descending sort. You can learn [...]

It’s Day 1 of #24HOP and it’s been great to participate in this event with so many women from all over the world in one long training-fest. The SQL community has been abuzz on Twitter with running commentary which is fun to watch while listening to the current speaker. If you missed the fun today [...]