Recently I’ve come to understand that I have not fully the specifications of a RESTful API. In fact, most of my work would be called a Web Service API. There are some key distinctions between the two. You’ll know if you are following REST principles based on how your API is consumed. While both a Web Service API and a […]

Today I was talking with a colleague about a performance issue he was having on a SQL Server instance. It reminded me of a few war stories that may be of interest. The key point I want to make is based on data dissonance. Data dissonance is when you are joining or searching for data where one or more columns […]

Many applications use ORM tools and generators that provide a lot of bells and whistles. The more functionality added to the ORM, the less responsive they seem to become. You’ll find ORMs with Cache, relational mapping, data change migration, repositories, all on top of interacting with the data store. I have an application using Entity Framework that takes a few […]

Swallowing errors is not a good practice in software development. But it is often done because it’s the least path of resistance. What do I mean by Swallowing errors? Most of you understand this term. For those of you who haven’t heard this phrase, Swallowing Errors is the technique where we capture errors, do nothing with them, and allow the […]

If you have been following the Dot Net world lately then you will know how Open Source is impacting the development of the framework. I watched a presentation by Jeffrey Fritz, who is a senior program manager with the Microsoft Developer Outreach Group, regarding the impact of open source contributions to the Dot Net framework, and its specific impact on […]

There are times when you need to store information for configuration or tracking SQL operations. This can be true regardless of the SQL engine you use. I have found that a simple, Key Value pair, table definition allows me to flexibly store and retrieve data inside a database, allowing it to be accessed by SQL queries without having to make […]

Today I wanted to open a conversation comparing two different dot net implementations of web services. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) has been with available for many years, and is quite powerful. A later technology started as a RESTful api, hosted originally in WCF, but was later released as Web API. Both implementations have grown to be mature products. WCF was […]

What was null!? I’m sure you’ve had your share of frustration asking the question, what was null, when receiving an error message in your application stating that you have “An unhandled exception of type ‘System.NullReferenceException’ occurred in…’ and then gave you the name of your exe or dll causing the error. If you’re like me, your response is something like, […]

Today I want to take a look at what could be considered bad SQL. The difference is that the bad, or at least less efficient, SQL is the result of design decisions when creating the tables. The root cause is the choice of the string data type when storing characters in a table. When fixed length data types are used, […]

Today I wanted to look at the problem of using fixed string length data types, as a follow on to some SQL mistakes folks make. However, there was some confusion (and inaccuracies) in my example from yesterday, that I want to take a step back and clarify. I had to create a bogus query example in order to protect confidentiality, […]