Formatting SQL Code for Blogs

Up until recently, all the SQL code on this blog looked awful: completely lacking in formatting and unreadable (though still useful!). It looked like this:

SELECT
*
FROM
Ow.My.Eyes.Hurt

Then I discovered The Simple-Talk Code Prettifier.

You pop your formatted SQL code in (copied out of SSMS or Visual Studio), choose the style of HTML (forums in my case), whether to correct indenting and lenth of tabs etc., and voila: html code is produced which results in something real pretty like the below:

SELECT
         *
   FROM
         Oh.That.Be.Nice
         

Thanks to the HOBT (Aaron Alton) for blogging about this tool better and sooner than I.

Ongoing Education for the Terminally Lazy/Busy

Reading msdn articles and whitepapers and textbooks blows goats as far as I'm concerned. I'm interested for about 5 minutes, max.

However I’ve been learning a lot about SQL (as well as plenty of other things) since I got myself set up in the RSS world, subscribing to blog and site feeds in Google Reader.

Maybe I’m preaching to the choir on this blog entry about RSS, but amongst the DB people I know very few seem that savvy about efficient net usage.

These sites below publish regularly, and when you subscribe to them in Google Reader, you can get a heap of relevant information into your unread “inbox” instead of regularly checking sites to see if anything’s updated.

If you’ve got a gmail account, you’re crazy not to start using Reader, and it works great on mobile phones cutting down bandwidth hungry sites into nice little readable chunks.

So, below, are my favourite sites/blogs which update regularly with useful SQL goodies. At least check them out, and if you’re not already in the RSS feed world, get yourself subscribed to these guys in Google Reader and you’ll be picking up more info than ever in a digestible fashion.

Blogs:
http://www.brentozar.com/
http://statisticsio.com/
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/sql-server/
http://blog.sqlauthority.com/

For sites, check out:
http://sqlserverpedia.com/wiki and http://www.sqlservercentral.com/