Gregg Keizer writes about a new model for releasing Microsoft Windows software beginning when Windows 10 hits the market. His editorial is based on input from the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2014 where Michael Silver and Stephen Kleynhans review the plan for future Windows releases. It appears that there is an intention to release updates to the Windows operating system monthly in […]

Mail Merge through Email is a really cool technology. Using Mail Merge you can create the contents any number of different ways. You can do office automation, use third party controls, or even roll your own templates with whatever logic works for your application. The key is that you are using data from your systems to generate the contents of […]

Today I am catching up on my backlog of reader response emails for various topics. Mark – Traits of a Good Software Developer I think your point about passion is key. One note I might add to your thoughts is how to encourage passion in a development team. Even if a team is given freedom of scope for “passionate” work, […]

A while back I wrote about using null as a third value for a bit data type in SQL Server. The problem is not that storage doesn’t work. The problem is that often those bit columns are used to identify state, and allowing null values does not enable indexing, resulting in slower query performance in some cases. One such case […]

Big Data has become a secondary revenue stream for many businesses, in fact, a primary revenue stream for others. There is a complete eco-system for selling information about your customers, and to those companies who sell information, this is a gold mine. Smart phone apps are some of the best ways to gather information about you. If you leave your […]

The Windows 10 preview is here; at least in a really early form. From the images I have seen it looks like a combination of Tiles from Windows 8 and program selection from Windows 7. At least, that is how it looks in the current version. Follow this link http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2014/09/30/announcing-windows-10/ to get more information. Windows 10 is far from complete. […]

In a previous editorial we were talking about the New DBA and how the role is changing, or can be changing. AZ Jim comments that there is a lot to be said of the out-of-the-box stability of products like SQL Server. His question is, "will you find a similar capability in other platform"s. That is one of the reasons we […]

Recently I was reviewing a stored procedure written to locate or remove white space from a string. The procedure used a pointer to loop through the string, addressing each character one at a time. If the character was white space, carriage return, line feed or tab, then it was excluded from the final string. Otherwise, the character was concatenated with […]

This evening I came across an editorial posted on Forbes talking about the value of an employee to a company. It listed 15 traits that make an individual a valued contributor to a company and the companies teams. Although intelligence was important, there were a number of other traits that had higher impact on the value of an individual. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kensundheim/2013/04/02/15-traits-of-the-ideal-employee […]

Have you looked at the Light Switch application generator from Microsoft? I don’t hear a lot of buzz around it. But, within the target audience for which it is designed you can stand up an application really quickly. I just finished walking through a tutorial using a sample database I designed and the experience was surprisingly refreshing. Light Switch works […]