Rob Farley

Rob Rob Farley has been consulting in IT since completing a Computer Science degree with first class honours in 1997. Before moving to Adelaide, he worked in consultancies in Melbourne and London. He runs the development department in one of Australia's leading IT firms, as well as doing database application consultancy and training. He heads up the Adelaide SQL Server User Group, and holds several Microsoft certifications.

Rob has been involved with Microsoft technologies for most of his career, but has also done significant work with Oracle and Unix systems. His preferred database is SQL Server and his preferred language is C#. Recently he has been involved with Microsoft Learning in the US, creating and reviewing new content for the next generation of Microsoft exams.

Over the years, Rob's clients have included BP Oil, OneLink Transit, Accenture, Avanade, Australian Electorial Commission, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, the Royal Borough of Kingston, Help The Aged, Unisys, Department of Treasury and Finance (Vic), National Mutual, the Bible Society and others.

Did you mean to come here? My blog is now at http://msmvps.com/blogs/robfarley



16 February 2006

A couple of useful SQL2005 facts

One that seems to have been missed by everyone until this week is that you can now use getdate() in a user-defined function. You couldn't do this in SQL2000, because of determinism. It's been mentioned in quite a few blogs - Peter Ward's is one. Peter is coming to speak at AdSSUG in March.

Another useful thing is about backups. Geoff Orr tells about it in his blog. Through funky use of partitioning and marking certain things as read-only, you can reduce the size of backups by a lot, because you're only backing up data that could be changing. For the rest, you'd be relying on previous backups. (Obviously you'd need to have taken them at some point)

Geoff is a great guy. He lives in Sydney, works at Microsoft in SQL Support, and is a Christian to boot. He helped start one of the biggest churches in London! Hopefully he'll come and speak at our little group in Adelaide some time soon.

Posted by Rob Farley at 10:23 am