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 […]

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. […]