Next week we’ll be opening the doors to the Spring 2016 SSWUG Virtual Conference. We’ll be bringing all the greatest speakers directly to you – watch from your office, from home, whatever works best for you. I’ve seen some of these session materials already – there are going to be some amazing presentations. From how-to, to developer to administrator to […]

For the longest time, some of the biggest hesitations have been founded in security in the cloud. But things are changing – the problems are starting to get resolved. As different things come online, from always encrypted SQL Server features to dealing with certificates and keys and the like, it seems to be time to reconsider and reevaluate. I caught […]

Many things have changed since SQL Server 2005 – while it seems like an obvious statement (it was 10 years or so ago after all), SQL Server 2005 was a major release for SQL Server in terms of stability, applications and more. It seems like nearly every time we survey the community, or look at session and article traffic, SQL […]

SQL Server 2016 is offering a new function, COMPRESS (and it’s counterpart, DECOMPRESS) that will gzip the contents of the information you pass to them. As you can imagine, these are great when applied to text values, and will have lesser impact when applied to already compressed things like some image formats and the like. But the real value are […]

I’ve become a big proponent of the cloud – but for surprising reasons. I think there are big, broad, wide-ranging lessons to be learned about how to manage data, how to relate data and even learning across data sources. Sure, (booming voice) Big Data — has all sorts of promise. You’ll get a boost to learnings and use of your […]

Azure Search is getting some killer abilities. I have to admit these are near and dear to my own heart with our work here at SSWUG and on client projects. Why? Because visual elements are so important to many systems. From images to video, full text search is support search of the content in those items now. This means that, […]

There is a lot to like in the new SQL Server 2016 that is nearing release, but a couple of really major, broad items are catching my eye, and they are things that can both help your installations and provide for better infrastructure going forward. The first is encryption. Now that you’ll have the Always on Encryption feature to enable. […]

More and more there’s a common thread in people reaching out for help with databases. Them: “We created this system and it needs to be updated, changed…” Me: “What needs to be changed, and how is your system set up?” Them: “We need to add X, Y and Z and I’m not sure how it really works, I sign on […]

This post on sys-con.com – about using the Agile approach (often used for development projects) for threat modeling and prioritization is a really great set of ideas. If you’re not actively folding threat modeling and active thought on prioritization of threats into your development and admin cycles, it’s an almost certainty that you’re missing the boat and are going to […]

I found this article about personalization and marketing using big data to be really interesting. It was talking about some trends that are addressing why personalization just isn’t quite there yet. Some of the statements were really revealing in real-world terms for how big data projects are progressing. Here’s an example: One reason marketing messages and offers are still so […]