I’ve been using Linq a lot lately demonstrating set operations that were exclusively SQL work for me in the past. However, now I am working with a lot of data that does not come from a relational data store, and libraries such as Entity Framework have no impact on my work. I am gather sets of data from a multitude […]

Ian responds to the need for scheduling tools in my previous editorial. He provides a number of tools a company might consider for both large and smaller organizations, at different pricing points. Ian writes: Good article. As a SQL Server DBA, job scheduling was one of my biggest bugbears when moving from a large company to a smaller one. It […]

I was reading a performance comparison by Ben Snaidero of In Memory tables in SQL Server 2014 to Disk Tables, and not surprised that the differences were not that far apart. Why would that be? Unless you have hiding or simply new to SQL Server you have been told that SQL Server performs all of the data manipulation in cache. […]

How is your skills with Linq? The reason I ask is because I find a lot of set problems work nicely in Linq much as they do in SQL. You can do joins, grouping order aggregation filtering and much more. The concepts are very similar to SQL, but different enough that it takes a little amount o f work to […]

A number of database optimizations methods have been added to or enhanced in SQL Server or Windows. They all do basically the same thing. They reduce the time needed to access data. In memory databases are the latest SQL Server optimization allowing databases to exist completely in RAM. Very high performance can be obtained from this implementation. SSD has been […]

Many systems today still have powerful batch processing engines. IBM based hardware has a history of powerful batch processing engines handling user defined job queues. This allows systems programmers to maintain multiple job queues allowing multiple processes to execute concurrently, and having jobs within a single queue run in sequence. When working in the Windows environment it seems like there […]

BI and Data Warehousing are two of the hottest topics I see today. Job Boards are flooded with companies searching for people with BI/DW experience. I mostly see advertisements for the Oracle or Microsoft BI stack. There are a number of IBM tools included as well. What seems to be on the decline are companies looking for NoSql kinds of […]

Here’s a response from Dilip on the topic of knowing when to quit: 1. There is a famous saying that "Your Cognizance never Increases; it is your incognizance that diminishes". So, we all are with serious limitations in many aspects and software is no exception. 2. If you do not indulge in "I am the only smart Alex in the […]

The idea behind RESTful services is the ability to expose methods and data to any consumer capable of making an HTTP connection. It differs from SOAP by reducing the complexity of the communication using a few basic HTTP verbs. The net result is that you can write applications on a web server, smart phone, tablet, computer, etc. all of which […]

Today I want to talk about a skill that I think is one of the most difficult for any IT professional; knowing when to quit or ask for help. As a professional we are employed for our abilities to solve problems. For me, solving software problems is a blast. I would do it even if it wasn’t my job. I […]