Getting the Big Picture – Part One A while back we talked about how the face of monitoring has changed. Historically we monitored individual servers and their performance because we knew so much about what servers we had, and what software was running on them. Today with the cloud or virtual servers your load can move without your knowledge or […]

A Sharding Lesson in Replication Here is an idea I gleaned from a comment in a blog on the Cassandra web site about sharding. It turns out that no-sql has similar difficulties when it comes to sharding techniques. The blog was about handling high scalability for Social Network sites; http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/10/13/why-are-facebook-digg-and-twitter-so-hard-to-scale.html; The key to sharding is to distribute data across multiple […]

Encryption – Final Thoughts Database encryption can be performed at a number of levels. Encrypt the drive(s) on which the database is hosted Encrypt the Entire Database Encrypt the Data before sending it to the Database Encrypt the Data inside the database itself Encrypt backups All of these techniques are effective and serve different purposes. I like to start with […]

Database Encryption – Part 1 This is a topic I love to review every once in a while. Encryption is a big enough task; but, wrap a database around it, and you have a bigger can of worms. Why would you want your database encrypted? Database backups take offsite may be restored easily if they are not encrypted If a […]

What’s In a Name? – Final Part 3 Today we end this series on the power of choosing good names for your code. We have not been getting into conventions so much in regard to case, plurality and some of the other things well documented for establishing standards. We have been taking a broader approach to the power of choosing […]

What’s In a Name? – Part 2 Last week in Part 1 I discussed the importance of naming a data element when it comes to aggregation, and reuse. Today I am going to consider the usefulness of table and column names themselves in a general perspective. Unless your intention is to obfuscate the contents of your database, using good names […]

What’s In a Name? What we call things in software matters. Naming conventions make communication easier for other developers, and can help bring clarity to the software for yourself. Overloading a term is a common occurrence. I find this more common in summary data where you might have a term such as Sale Amount. What is a Sale Amount? Well, […]

The Cloud Paradigm Shift Many companies try to utilize the cloud using the same techniques they used when hosting their own applications, or hosting it in a data center. Servers, IP Addresses, Machine Names and many other things are essential for success and maintenance. In contrast, when using the cloud you tend to think in terms of functionality. Web services, […]

Multi-process Contention in SQL When you have multiple processes managing the same data in your database, often you will need some sort of transactional model assuring multiple processes don’t pick up the same unit of work (rows in a table). The easiest technique to separate processes is to lock records to/being processed. I like the queue table concept which I […]

How is SharePoint as a Wiki Microsoft SharePoint is a great place for collaboration. Companies build so many different kinds of things with SharePoint as a central engine. It makes a great repository for sharing reports, lists, PowerPivot sets, and many other kinds of documents as well. Did you know that SharePoint also supports Microsoft’s version of a Wiki? Now […]