As I have been watching the startup of new projects using the Dot Net stack it looks like Silverlight is being replaced with MVC or MVVM based on HTML5 capabilities. I’m not saying one is better or worse, or even making capability comparisons. Moreover, Silverlight has more capabilities in older browsers in those situations where installing a client tool is […]

SQL Server introduced the XML data type in 2005 as a native storage for XML documents. Because it is truly XML aware, it validates any XML saved to make sure it is correctly formed. It has additional benefits if you provide a schema, assuring that the xml is not only well formed, but conforms to the specified schema. Additionally, the […]

Old habits die hard; at least for me that is true. I find that I am still using the old DateTime data type, even though other options were introduced in SQL Server 2008 resulting in equivalent, more, or less precision while using less memory in some cases. Susan Ibach did a nice blog a few years ago breaking out some […]

Maurice shares another relational database anti-pattern. I saw a case where a table had rows with a single meaning from business rules. They extend the application and add a type to the row for new business cases. The table became very complex to query, since there was alternate rows for the original business case. In the beginning getting the most […]

Recently I encountered a database design intended to reduce the load on a relational database that actually had the reverse impact. The problem was a parent child relationship having a 1 to 1 or many relationship. Normally you would use two tables. You would have a parent table and a child table, containing a foreign key to the parent table. […]

In any database in order to have consistency it is important to have one ultimate source of truth. Many times we want to have that data in different forms. So, do we maintain the data in different forms, or derive it from a single form? For example, you have data in relational tables in a database. You wish to see […]

How are your ADO.Net skills? Many times you are not required to write code directly in ADO.Net because you are using frameworks that handle the database communication on your behalf. Entiry Framwork, Linq to SQL, nHibernate, net Tiers, Dapper DB, and many other libraries and frameworks handle the database communication for you. Then there are those times when it makes […]

I think we need a new term for the Postal Services of the world. We used to call them Snail Mail because it took a while for your letter to be delivered; especially when compared to using Email. Today I came to realize that I now consider Email to be Snail Mail. Texting on my cell phone, using instant messaging, […]

Reading Paul Hebhardt’s editorial from SQL Central yesterday I became aware that SQL Azure now supports real world Backup and Restore. Previously we were restricted to simply performing a full point in time backup to blob storage. Now SQL Azure has plans that include real backup and restore capabilities. According to MSDN there are three new SQL Azure tiers with […]

The model database is a standard database created for every instance of SQL Server, just like Master, MSDB and TempDB. Unlike the other system databases, model is not used frequently. In fact, it is only used when a new database is created. When you create a new database, it clones the model database. So, as you can see, every user […]