Finding T SQL Anti Patterns with ScriptDOM by Mala Mahadevan

The repo for this talk is available at https://github.com/dmaloo/Scriptdom-P...

Quality code is free of things we call 'anti-patterns' - nolock hints, using SELECT *, queries without table aliases and so on.
We may also need to enforce certains standards: naming conventions, ending statements with semicolons, indenting code the right way etc. Furthermore, we may need to apply specific configurations on database objects, such as to create tables on certain filegroups or use specific settings for indexes.

All of this may be easy with a small database and a small volume of code to handle, but what happens when we need to deal with a large volume of code? What if we inherit something full of these anti-patterns, and we just don't have time to go through all of it manually and fix it? But suppose we had an automated utility that could do this for us? Even better, if we could integrate it in our Azure Devops pipelines?

ScriptDOM is a lesser-known free tool from SQL Server DacFx which has the ability to help with finding programmatic and stylistic errors (a.k.a linting) in T-SQL code.It can even fix some of these errors!
In this session we will learn about what it is, how we can harness its power to read code and tell us what it finds, and actually fix some of those anti-patterns.

Mala Mahadevan is a senior database professional with over 20 years of experience working with data, primarily in SQL Server and related technologies. She has been volunteering with SQL Server community for the past 15 years and is also a recipient of the PASSion award for being an outstanding volunteer. She is a featured blogger on sqlservercentral.com and also blogs frequently at curiousaboutdata.com. She is active on twitter as @sqlmal.