There are lots of ways we have tried to help users find their data in the midst of a large set. Filters, ranges, and much more have been used allowing users to sort and narrow down the list, with the hope of finding what they are looking for. Who hasn’t been discouraged when running a Google search, and they aren’t […]

For those of you who develop in Dot Net, you should be aware that Microsoft has stopped supporting recent versions of the Dot Net framework. Support for Versions 4.0, 4.5 and 4.5.1 discontinued this week, Tuesday, January 12, 2016. Versions 3.5, 4.5.2, 4.6 and 4.6.1 will continue to be supported. This means any software you are using that uses the […]

Microsoft is making a bold move with IE 11, by deprecating earlier versions much quicker than in the past. Yesterday, they discontinued support for IE 8, 9, and 10. This is a much earlier lifecycle for discontinuing previous versions of the IE browser. The intention is to reduce the amount of support needed to keep multiple versions running concurrently, reducing […]

A finbonacci sequence is a sequence of numbers that add the two previous numbers to determine the next number in the sequence. So a sequence starting with 0 and 1 would look like… 0,1………..0 + 1 0,1,1………1 + 1 0,1,1,2…….1 + 2 0,1,1,2,3…..2 + 3 0,1,1,2,3,5…3 + 5 etc. I am using a sequence table to determine how many times […]

Stored procedures can be difficult to test. The logic can be quite complex from time to time. So, how do you test them? When I have a complex stored procedure, without respect to the kind of procedure being created (Insert, Update, Delete, Query), there are a few tips I have found that help validate that the procedure is working correctly. […]

Today I’m sharing a couple of programming tips for Stored Procedures I have found to be helpful, but not commonly demonstrated. First, I like to declare local variables in stored procedures, using them like an ENUM in other languages. They do away with magic numbers, or the need to have comments wherever numbers are used. Instead, I declare a variable […]

For nearly any engine persisting data, it is helpful, if not essential, to understand the internal workings of the engine, in order to maintain good performance over time. That’s a bold statement. So, let me give some evidence to back it up. Let’s talk about SQL Server specifically for right now. Here are some things that if you know about […]

Continuing with my thoughts on skills you may wish to acquire this year I started thinking about the skills used by a Database Architect (DBA). Previously we looked at skills for the production DBA, those people who keep the lights on, and the data pure. A Database Architect, in contrast, is more focused on the actual schema of the data. […]