Will Hybrid Devices Become the Norm? I use a Hybrid drive today on my laptop and love it. The drive is a combination of SSD and traditional Hard Disk. The controller on the disk keeps frequently accessed files on the SSD, and all files on the hard disk. This allows the disk to have really good performance. Before I installed […]

Using Date Functions in TSQL I was recently asked what was the scope of a date function in a TSQL script or procedure. I remembered it as having been resolved at the time the script or procedure was compiled and executed. Turns out my memory was flawed. I found out because I decided to test my memory. First a ran […]

Abstraction vs. Automated Development While automated development and Abstracted/Loosely coupled software are not mutually exclusive, there are compromises made when using automated development tools. For example, I love Object/Relational Mapping generation software. Tools like hibernate, nHibernate, Entity Framework, and dozens more, all produce well architected software following extensible patterns. Once you modify the generated code you raise the risk of […]

What is the Correct Amount of Abstraction? The purpose of abstraction in software is to make it easier to modify in the future adding un-anticipated requirements. Rather than trying to think of every possible contingency, build your software so that it can more easily be extended with the least amount of effort. Software having very rigid contracts between components is […]

Temp Table Scope Works In Your Favor Temporary tables are a useful feature in Microsoft SQL Server. You may even be using them without even knowing it. SQL Server will often break down queries into steps, using virtual temp tables as intermediate steps to resolve complicated queries. If you use persisted temp tables by defining them like a regular table […]

Should You Monitor Deprecated Software? Software features are frequently deprecated in most active software packages. For those of you not familiar with the term Deprecation, a simple description may be that a feature is considered obsolete, and future releases may not support the feature any longer. Deprecation happens for a number of reasons. Sometimes features are deprecated and re-introduced in […]

What’s QUOTED_IDENTIFIERS All About? Yesterday I wrote about having to use brackets to get SQL Server to accept my DML commands to CREATE and DROP objects using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). Others wrote they had not experienced this and could not reproduce the behavior. Today, I also was unable to reproduce the behavior. I can’t say why SSMS was […]

[Read Between the Brackets] I’ve been working in SQL Server Management Studio 2012 today and found something rather annoying. I tried to execute an SQL Command DROP PROCEDURE someProcedure and received an error warning stating that my syntax was incorrect somewhere at ‘ ‘. I have two observations: What a useless error message The problem was that SSMS expected DROP […]

Business Changes Moving to Software as a Service What kinds of change can a business expect moving to Software as a Service? Perhaps a look at Microsoft Azure may give us some ideas. Before I dig in to changes too much, let me remind us that the concept of timeshare utilization of large resources is not a new concept. Mainframe […]

Developer Changes Moving to Software as a Service The hurdles for software developers to jump while transitioning to Software as a Service are not very high. Again I’m looking specifically at Azure due to the simplicity Microsoft has put into the platform. Still, Azure is not the only game in town. Tools used for developing code for Azure are the […]