Readers Comments Daniel: RE: Corporate DNA I like this article. I think I would add… – Stewardship of your organizations skillset inventory and toolset. I think to keep an organisations dna intact and progressive, you need to feed not only your skillset but those of your peers and interested parties. Many people intend to do well for the organization but […]

Database normalization is still an important skill, and may even be applied to object design as well. One of the first rules of normalization is that all the attributes in a table must be dependent on, and only on, the primary key. This means that you cannot have a column in a table that changes meaning based on the value […]

As humans we are members of many different social groups, each with its own individual DNA. One of those groups we probably share is that of an IT professional. Regardless of your specific skillset or expertise, there are things you share with other technical professionals in your organization. Since the DNA of the organization consists of all participants you have […]

Yesterday I had a good comment in regards to optimizing Dot Net code http://bitonthewire.wpengine.com/editorials/readed.aspx?id=3284, and using ToList() as a materializer of Linq statements. Craig writes: One comment on point #1: when you *do* ToList() your query be sure that you have already included all your Where’s. When you ToList() the query will execute and all the data will head from […]

Recently I have been thinking about different things I have done to optimize Dot Net code over the last few years and trying to come up with some of the top performers. Here are two big performance optimizations. Materialize Dot Net Linq expressions. When you perform Linq expressions resulting in values that will be enumerated (pretty much anytime) be sure […]

You need to optimize your SQL database performance in SQL Server, and have discovered a large amount of the time to produce results is during disk access. You have plenty of memory on the machine, and want to take advantage of it. What options are available to you? Without doing anything SQL Server will take advantage of available memory to […]

The USA released a comprehensive national health insurance enrollment system within the last year as a method for implementing the new laws and regulations for health insurance. The release was poorly received because the application didn’t work effectively on many fronts. I do not know any specifics about the application. But there is a lot that can be known due […]

This is probably old news to many of you. But I am optimistic about the Microsoft approach to make Dot Net software available to be hosted outside the Microsoft set of operating systems. They are starting with Dot Net Core, a set of libraries of shared capabilities found in all implementations of Dot Net. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/11/12/net-core-is-open-source.aspx There are a couple of […]

Data retention is one of my favorite database topics because it has one of the greatest impacts on database performance. It also has a great impact on the capabilities of a company to fully utilize information for profit and efficeiency. Keeping too much data causes you database performance to degrade, increases the length of maintenance windows, and can even result […]

Recently, while attending a local PASS presentation, I had a conversation with a young person who was building their skills as a SQL Server DBA. Their company is growing and their desire to use technology efficiently has been identified as an important component of that growth. Their company has purchased a licensing program with Microsoft providing them with SharePoint. Management […]