Did you know that Microsoft supports two different kinds of queuing in the Azure Platform? You can view a comparison of both at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh767287.aspx. There are Azure Queues and Service Bus Queue. Each have their own characteristics. Queues are a basic Rest based technology built on top of the Azure Storage Infrastructure for reliable messaging between services. Service Bus Queues […]

Greg writes in as a response to using an SQL Server table as a queue instead of a queuing service. His requirements are simple, and this method works well for them. Regarding your question about queues in SQL Server, we have an application that uses SQL Server as a queue for emails. We decided to take this approach instead of […]

If you are new to SQL Server you may not know about connection pooling, a topic I have been returning to quite a bit lately. Pooling may be turned on and off in the database connection string. However, if the connection string is not properly formatted it can end up in an unknown state. There is nothing you have to […]

I have written here on SSWUG a few times with tips or articles about how to use SQL Server tables as a queue. It’s rather simple to do and quite effective. Today I wanted to ask a few questions about this practice. There are some alternatives available today that you could use for queuing instead. For example, you could use […]

Maurice has been a regular contributor to my column with insightful responses and helpful tips. Today Maurice responds to the topic of Master Data Management. He writes: Duplicate Data is expensive in development costs. If the data would have the same structure everywhere replication mechanism would reduce costs, but often you see duplicate data attributes associated in several ways with […]

The cost of dirty data is difficult to assess. Mike comments in yesterday’s editorial with a number of costs that can arise as a result of poorly managed data. Probably the biggest cost is the reputation of your company and its data assets. If you have multiple records for the same information it may be counted multiple times, skew summary […]

No matter if you intentionally shard data or simply have multiple packsystems for managing your business it is highly probably that you have multiple copies of the same information. Your accounting system has accounts payable and accounts receivable, each most likely having customer or vendor information. You could also have your sales system, or warehousing system with overlapping data. Perhaps […]

Data is one of those resources that tends to stick around long after its usefulness has diminished or been depleted completely. In my observation this is because it isn’t too expensive to keep around, and it many of the technique for reducing the cost or retention require a redesign of your systems to move or access it. Often times nothing […]

Nulls in a database have been an area of contention since they were first available and implemented. The primary purpose of null as originally designed was as a placeholder where no value was available. In the case of true/false null provided a tertiary value of unknown, or undefined. You will get a lot of helpful information about null and how […]

In my experience it is better for developers who do not understand database connection pooling to not use it than to use it incorrectly. In many of the new frameworks this is handled for you, the creating and tearing down of connections, and the return of a closed connection object to the connection pool. In those instances when you roll […]