Administrator Changes Moving to Software as a Service As an administrator of databases and software for your company, moving to Software as a Service will have a small impact on your skill set for development tools, processes, testing, and security. Let’s consider Azure as the predominant host of Dot Net Software as a Service hosts. Microsoft provides within their development […]

Microsoft Vision of Software As A Service is Taking Form I was reading Stephen Wynkoop’s editorial from a couple days ago about some of the new features being brought into Azure. Surprised was I to find FoxPro in that list. Not long ago Microsoft announced it would no longer be releasing any new updates for Visual FoxPro. When you think […]

Scorecards for Small Businesses In the mid-1980s I worked for a small non-profit organization with an annual budget just under $250k. We worked hard as an organization to develop the equivalent of Scorecards as a way to track our goals and accomplishments as they applied to the purpose and intentions of the organization. Because we didn’t have much more than […]

Scorecards – Why does every BI tool have them? I came across the concept of Key Performance indicators and Scorecards in the Harvard Business Review, and a book I read by one of the professors on the topic, about 10 years ago. The concept so intrigued me, I was talking with a few co-workers about starting a company based around […]

Database Sharding/Partitioning Overview Back when Microsoft SQL Server 2005 was still in Community Technical Preview stage, months before the release, some of the SQL team working with integrating XML into SQL Server released a white paper on TechNet reviewing the methodology behind creating indexes on the contents of the XML data type. I read the paper back then and was […]

Securing SQL Assets We talk a lot about securing your database assets in SQL Server. We cover concepts such as authentication techniques and which one is the best fit. Utilizing Schemas to separate ownership of database objects. Creating groups and users to manage permissions for objects more easily. Granting and revoking of privileges reducing the vulnerability for database consumers. It […]

Learn SQL Syntax from Templates Yesterday we shared how scripting objects from SQL Server Management Studio dialogs may be useful for learning SQL Syntax. You might use the table designer to complete a table definition, and then choose Script to see the SQL Syntax used to create the table, set defaults, etc. In response to Ed writes in with another […]

Accidental DBA Quick Learning Technique You need to get work done. You need to get it done quickly. You don’t have time to dig through books online to figure out the syntax to get something done. But you want to learn. What do you do instead? One of the neatest features of a tool like Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio […]

Accidental DBA and SQL Server Roles SQL Server has database level roles to make your job easier when managing database access and permissions. This allows you to create your own database roles, define what capabilities that role should allow or deny, and manage it as a whole. Having defined a role, you can then assign a database user to one […]

Primary Key Selection Recently I was talking with a colleague about defining the schema for a table…what columns to include and utilize for primary and foreign keys. The parent table contained a natural key that would be defined as requiring a unique value, and could therefore be used as a primary key. My colleague also has a standardized policy for […]