Indexing for Different Queries When you have a table that is queried using many different kinds of criteria it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to build a reasonable number of indexes supporting all the different queries. Most developers know that as you create more indexes on a table it slows down the performance of the table for creating or updating […]

Azure Backups Microsoft has developed a number of different technologies taking advantage of the Azure Blob Storage Service. One of the most impressive of these technologies is the Backup Service. Taking advantage of the durability of the Blob Storage Service, Microsoft has built backup and restore capabilities allowing you to backup and restore servers, files and databases. Backups can be […]

LINQ and Lambda Expressions Communication Intentions In a procedural language you can easily write code without Lambda Expressions and LINQ using a “for” or “foreach” structure. Performance is generally not an issue, and if you know how to write LINQ queries to utilize the underlying engine you may find as good or even better performance. So, why would you use […]

Event Driven Programming Over the Web A while back I pointed you to SignalR as a tool for performing a sort of event driven programming over the web. One of the most efficient ways to enable SignalR is the Web Socket API released by the W3C HTML5 specification in conjunction with IETF RFC 6455. All by itself Web Sockets has […]

Java 8 – Will it Catch Up? According to the presentations at the last JavaOne conference held in San Fransisco this last week the next release of Java is going to be revolutionary. Matt Raible did a great job of communicating the main thrust for the new direction of Java still to be released. You can read his editorial for […]

Splice Machine How would you like to have one data engine supporting all your application needs including OLAP and OLTP. Generally, the needs of either environment require an engine specifically tuned for each. My colleague, Jason, forwarded to me an Email from Splice Machine regarding their new engine targeted to create one engine to fulfill both OLTP and BIG Data […]

Triggers for Auditing In response to our last two editorials on the love/hate relationship with triggers Marc writes about how he likes to use triggers for auditing data modifications. Marc Says: Whilst I know that there always exists many ways to accomplish any given task, there is one area where I find triggers the most useful approach. This is in […]

Triggers – Oh What a Feeling As a follow-up on SQL Trigger discussion I have a few comments and a lengthy reader response. Before declarative referential integrity was introduced in SQL Server we used triggers (ancient history). I work with customers who have partitioned their data into multiple databases. In those cases, a trigger is the only way to enforce […]

SQL Triggers – a Love Hate Relationship I have a love/hate relationship with using triggers in SQL. It doesn’t matter what SQL engine I’m using. Why do I love triggers? Triggers are great for extending legacy systems when you don’t have access to the source of data, or modifying the Create/Update/Delete statements is either out of your reach or too […]

Public Cloud – Out of Your Control One of the things you need to consider when using/choosing a public cloud service is availability. This is a fair question for any software wherever it is hosted. The difference is who controls outages. Without any criticism of public cloud services, there are outages, and you have to manage that possibility. There are […]