Forwards Compatibility In response to yesterday’s editorial I received a number of comments regarding backwards compatibility. I have been working with Microsoft SQL Server since version 4.21. Unlike many products I have used, SQL Server has been very generous in supporting deprecated features. Generally, the status of a feature is made known long before the product no longer supports it; […]

Database Upgrades With the recent release of SQL Server 2012 you now have more opportunities with your installations. Now the questions of upgrades, support for earlier versions, multiple version support, reverse compatibility and much more emerge once again. For those of you who have never experienced a release of a new version of SQL Server there is a lot to […]

SSWUGtv With Stephen Wynkoop In this episode Paul Zikopoulus with IBM – talking about big data, what it means, why it is important and much more. Watch the Show $$SWYNK$$ SQL Azure Federation Sharding I received a few questions about SQL Azure Federation today. My understanding is strictly through reading documentation materials from Microsoft…so be aware that I may be […]

SQL Azure Federations One of the coolest features in SQL Azure is Database Federations. Federations allow you to grow the power and size of your database in SQL Azure to an much larger scale than the largest single database allowed of 150Gig. For an overview of SQL Azure federations you can watch this into video from Microsoft demonstrating what Federations […]

What Can You Do With SQL Azure? One of the biggest risks of SMB database operations is the hosting of data. SQL Azure has been designed to fill that gap. But, it comes with a cost. The cost isn’t monetary alone. You lose a lot of capability in order to gain the shared benefit of a non-dedicated machine just for […]