Month: August 2009

I know I won’t be there, as I’m a million miles away in Australia, but being from the UK myself, I always have an interest in the UK SQL community and in particular, events like SQL Bits. This is the fifth SQL Bits conference, and they keep getting larger and larger. I’ve heard it’s now the largest SQL-focussed event in Europe. It’s going to be in South Wales (that’s OLD South Wales, not New South Wales), in November. I’m sure the area is lovely, good beaches ‘n all that… but considering it’s late November in Wales, I think you’ll be … Continue reading More SQL Conferences coming up, including SQL Bits and SQL Down Under

[ Hi – this post can now be found at http://blogs.lobsterpot.com.au/2009/08/05/still-learning-foreign-keys-don-t-need-to-reference-a-primary-key/

…but you should still have a primary key on every table of course. It’s just that I only recently discovered that you can have a foreign key that references something else, so long as it’s known to be unique through a unique index / constraint. The scripts here demonstrate this in SQL Server 2005 and beyond. create table testunique (id int identity(1,1) primary key, otherid int); go create unique index ixOther on testunique(otherid); go create table testFK (id int identity(1,1) primary key, someid int) go alter table testFK add constraint fkTest foreign key (someid) references testunique(otherid) go And then if … Continue reading Still learning… foreign keys don’t need to reference a primary key

There are times when you want to have a Navigation property of a textbox (typically providing a link to a URL or other report), but you don’t always want the link to be there. Sometimes you just want it to be an ordinary textbox. This particularly applies when you’re using a Matrix, and you don’t want the Subtotal rows to have the navigation links. Previously I’ve blogged about using InScope to control various properties. But the thing that I hadn’t noticed was how to make the link actually disappear. I could make it point at somewhere less useful (like the … Continue reading SSRS: Removing the Navigation link using an Expression