Recently I have been forced (for medical reasons) to take some time away from work. My situation is such that cannot work remotely. So, what to do? I can’t move around. I’ll quickly bore with movies Hey, how about taking an intentional training sabbatical, and catch up on all these new technologies I want to catch up on? Well, that’s […]
Author: Ben Taylor
Join Syntax
Did you know that you don’t have to use JOIN syntax when writing a SQL Query? You can simply list your tables, and put the join criteria in the where clause. In today’s world we typically create a join clause for each table joined after the original first table specified in the from clause. Here’s an example query pulling from […]
Resolving Developer Disagreement
In my experience, if you put two good developers in a room, you are going to have disagreement. That’s why you hired them in the first place so things are challenged. If it doesn’t lead to some resolution, then you have a problem. I know this is an old topic. But, today I was watching some training videos and came […]
It’s Not Just Microsoft Being Attacked
With the Equifax exploit being exposed it has become clear that hackers are not restricting their efforts to the Microsoft Stack. When Equifax released the method of intrusion into their system, it was based on a popular Java framework called Struts. Struts has been around a long time, and was one of the earlier tools that popularized the MVC pattern, […]
U-SQL
So you like the simplicity of the SQL Language. What if you could use SQL syntax against data that is not structured? Well, that is U-SQL. To get started using U-SQL you can find an introduction with links to more tutorials at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-lake-analytics/data-lake-analytics-u-sql-get-started. We already have the ability to work with data that may not be contained in an SQL Server […]
Analytic Functions
Since SQL Server 2012 was released, the SQL Server engine supports a new class of aggregate functions they have named Analytic. You can find documentation for the Analytic.functions at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/functions/analytic-functions-transact-sql. What I find that is cool about these Analytic functions is that they extend beyond the existing set of aggregate functions, allowing you to build queries that you could do previously,...
We Need Standards
While it may be politically correct to agree to disagree sometimes we require agreement on standards. We need standardization. Not because it is the ONLY RIGHT WAY to do anything. We need it because when things are done in a consistent fashion, multiple people can work on a project efficiently, because they know how things are put together. You could […]
How Do We Disagree
When it comes to working in IT it isn’t very hard to find an issue where people disagree. In fact, I think we have turned disagreement into an art. I believe that it is probably unrealistic to think a team of IT professionals will ever come to a point of agreement. If that’s true, what do we do? Frankly, I […]
Database Connection Encryption
A high priority for developers working with SQL data stores is to establish a way to access our Database without exposing our credentials. We want to protect our application from Hackers and hide the methods to establish a connection… This can be a bit of a problem with the most common method of establishing a database connection for our application […]
Anemic Objects
Object Oriented Code has the distinction of consolidating both exposed properties and methods within a single object. Moreover, there may also be methods contained in that object, not exposed to the world. We seem to be moving away from that design. It would seem that in modern software development environments we have moved away from intelligent objects closer to what...