Is SQL Server Consolidation Old-School Now? I’ve been having a bit of a debate on this very topic – where a major goal used to be trying to consolidate down your servers and try to optimize your configurations, now it’s quickly becoming the opposite. It’s a much more complicated question now when it comes to consolidation, optimization, availability and so-on. […]

Choose Your Weapons Carefully… Probably one of the most-asked questions when talking with people facing down the SQL Server beast is "where do I start…" followed by "how do I know what pieces to pay attention to?" I typically end up talking with the person about what they like doing with information and systems – do they prefer creating new […]

The Sky is Falling! Your Systems are Unsafe! I’ve seen far too many articles lately on, essentially, how screwed up your systems are, or how unsafe they are, or how the HeartBleed issue is going to make all of your information for all of history and the future vulnerable. Yikes! Take a breath and read these though. Really consider what […]

Code and Systems Reviews – Do You Do Them? We’re working through a number of systems to upgrade some processing, address the whole responsive thing and so-on. It amazes me how code and solutions just sort of "accumulate" over the years. Fix this, add that, change this… it all adds up to a lot of potential for areas ripe for […]

Little Data a Thing? When talking with a few different people, I’ve heard references to projects pulling in the breadth of data collected – I call it "little data" – basically running the other direction from efforts to capture everything and anything for analysis. Are you seeing this – or considering this in your application work? The pull in this […]

Have You Found That the Cloud Brings Discipline? The opportunity brought by cloud-based services is one of high-availability, scale and cost management. But it does come at a cost. You may be facing an architectural overhaul to truly take advantage of the cloud. We certainly have faced, and continue to face that fact. We’ve had to rebuild everything from data […]

Some Interesting SQL Server 2014 Elements SQL Server 2014 has some pretty amazing features. In-memory is clearly a pretty major area of enhancement and is something worth looking at and understanding as you work through architecting your solutions. Overall, if you’re not yet aware of the differences brought to the table by in-memory optimized operations, it’s all about speed and […]

SQL Server 2014 Goodness There is a lot to be talking about with SQL Server 2014 and the different things released around it. In case you missed it, it just recently dropped to production availability and there are some very cool things going on with the release. I think one of the more interesting things going on is more about […]

Agile vs. Big Picture – How Do You Reconcile? I had written about three different things to get started and out of the way when starting a project – things developers and consider in bringing a project online. Good feedback and questions though – and I’ve had questions on the site and in email about how this all fits in […]

The Stability of Information Systems is… Dangerous? Sorry to sound like an "old guy" but it used to be that when systems were deployed, much testing ensued and systems were essentially assumed questionable (at best) until proven accurate. Systems would be checked and double-checked, underlying engines would be load tested, beaten up to make sure they were doing what was […]