As I have been reviewing new features being built into SQL Server 2016, I found one I can really appreciate. Stretch Databases. Using stretch database, your data is partitioned according to frequency of access. Data used less frequently is archived onto different storage, isolated from the highly accessed data. The archived storage leverages Azure for reasonable performance at a reduced […]

Last week I wrote about SQL Server 2016. They are adding JSON as a data type. I’m not sure how much value that brings to a relational database engine. Certainly, the capability may be abused, as we have seen in XML. There are many comments in favor of a non-relational type of storage for the purposes of supporting Hierarchical data. […]

SQL Server 2016 is being enhanced to support JSON, much like they did when they added XML capabilities. I find this intriguing. Are they intending that SQL Server be an endpoint for REST clients? That would require endpoints and exposing your database server to consumers. I’m not sure I’m on board. It may save some work…but is it worth the […]

SQL Server 2016 now supports a driver based encryption called Always Encrypted. In essence, columns in your database tables may be encrypted, while working with them as the original un-encrypted data type from your application. The encryption works during the transport of the data from the application to SQL Server. This makes the database behave as fully encrypted when using […]

I was listening to a pod cast from Brent Ozar today, and was reminded of how important it is to organize yourself for success when working with software. Let me ask substantiate that with a question. What was the last time you had to figure something out again, after having figured it out earlier, but forgot how you did it? […]

I didn’t get much feedback on the value of writing software so that multiple versions can co-exist. Either it isn’t worth the extra effort or cost to write code in this fashion, or there really isn’t a need. Personally, I have found that there are rare instances where you simply end one version and begin a completely new version of […]

Every year or so I come back around to the SOLID principles of software development. They are easiest to implement in object oriented languages, but the principles still apply. If the SOLID acronym is new to you, take a trip to Wikipedia for an explanation. Today I want to talk about the O in solid, which stands for Open/Closed. Open […]

Here’s a little demonstration of the power of a sequence (or sometimes called Tally) table in SQL. The sequence table allows you to perform set logic for things that would normally require looping or procedural code. Today I was working on a query that produced a set of possible values, and then used an outer join to present all implemented […]

The final data warehouse design pattern I want to review in this series is Big Data. Unlike all of the other data warehousing structures we have reviewed so far, big data does not have to conform to a table like structure with relationships. In fact, it often has jagged arrays containing other arrays in the form of objects. Instead of […]

Today let’s compare the traditional data warehousing database schemas. Normalized data is not often used today for data warehousing. The key reason is that, while the normalization of the tables results in less redundancy, and higher quality of data, it comes with a cost, because data needs to be joined from multiple tables to produce the results needed for reporting […]