In a database there are two basic forms of time. The first is a point in time. This can be defined according to the smallest level of granularity available in your database engine. Often the nearest second is acceptable. In SQL Server, the single type DATETIME will round to the nearest 3 milliseconds. Using DATE and TIME you can be […]

I’m preparing a presentation on Time for the Fox Valley Pass group next week. I thought it might be nice to provide a little preview on the topic. One of my favorite characteristics of time is that it never stands still. What you do tomorrow will be yesterday, two days from now. The point is that time is durable. In […]

HTML 5 defines many new features that may be enabled through HTTP. One of the coolest, although, less applicable, is Web Sockets. Web sockets allow a client and server to open and maintain communications over a negotiated pipeline. You use sockets all the time, maybe without even knowing. When you open up a connection to a database server, the implementation […]

A tweet from Scott Hanselman pointed me to a blog, and a series of tweets targeted on mean behavior to immature commitments of code to open source projects. A blog was posted regarding mean responses to newbie commit requests, where the person in charge would accuse the individual of doing a bad job, and wasting their time. I reminded that […]

Way to go Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2015 RTM is available this week. There are a lot of new things that should really increase productivity. That’s really the reason for using a powerful code development tool of this kind. While it has been possible to create your own extensions for Visual Studio for quite some time, this release has a […]

Remember When: You had to create all your own database constraints through the use of triggers. Declarative referential integrity was not available. Check constraints were not available as part of a table design. Database Backups consisted of a series of INSERT INTO SomeTable VALUES … statements. This was pretty flexible, but did not backup the schema. It also took a […]

As companies continue to grow in scope and exposure, the importance of storing time in a database grows. Most companies have exposure to more than one time zone. Others, with international impact, find themselves with a larger impact. I, along with a large number of you, having worked with companies whose presence spans multiple continents, have found it necessary to […]

Entity Framework continues to grow in functionality. Using Code First, you can create a relational database from your Domain Objects and mappings, without knowing anything about a relational database engine. Due to this very powerful capability, many developers are under the impression that they have made the role of a database developer obsolete. I experience it at work; I see […]

Decades ago I used a popular database engine. It was a self-contained product, single tiered, providing both the application code for the user interface, and the database code for the storage behind it. The product had an annual version release. If you purchased to annual upgrade rights, you received a quarterly release that included bug fixes, and minor feature upgrades. […]

Earlier this week, I wrote an editorial on database scaling in Azure, using federations. Two readers left comments to point you to the fact that federations have been deprecated. I have not used federations for a couple of years, and they weren’t really that old to begin with. What’s more frustrating, I went to Google and did a search on […]