One of the things that making SQL (Structure Query Language) so popular is that it has become an ANSI standard for accessing data in relational databases. There are many different relational database engines available, yet the majority of them implement the core functionality of the ANSI SQL syntax. As No-SQL data engines continue to evolve, they generally do not support […]

In response to our earlier editorial on public clouds, Peter, a software engineer working for a European government, provides some perspective regarding the issues with hosting their resources on a multi-tenant cloud service. The factors for choosing a public host vs. a private hosting solution are changing. No longer are cost, performance, and scalability the primary issues. Some time ago […]

How well are the capabilities of Cloud resources really known? I recently spoke with an IT professional who builds custom applications for small businesses. These kinds of businesses represent the smallest business usually ignored by most service firms. They may purchase a server and it works for them for ten years or more. With that kind of longevity for hardware […]

I have been using Chrome as my browsing tool for quite a while now. I almost went back to Internet Explorer when Google decided I didn’t need the up and down arrows at the end of the vertical scroll bar. Nobody needs those because you can scroll using the wheel on the mouse or your arrow keys. At least that […]

Cloud Services in the USA are developing a bad reputation simply because of the intrusion by the US Government into private data assets. As a result some companies are abandoning the US hosting datacenters for locations around the world. The benefits of low cost, stable power and technical expertise are being threatened by the lack of security by an un-repentant […]

Reader Response to Top SQL Server Optimizing Tips Gareth writes: The one thing I would say is disable the Turbo features and configure the BIOS for the High Performance mode. If necessary disable hyperthreading. Regarding section 3 most of this used to be good stuff but in a world of managed hosted machines RAIDed, NAS & SAN storage it’s slightly […]

There is a lot of activity on the question regarding the application of Declarative Referential Integrity, ie. Should you always use it? I was surprised to see some reasonable ideas of how/when you should not use DRI. There were some common points in all of the online comments from our readers. DRI should be the norm, not the exception. DRI […]

A couple days ago I shared some of the results of a conversation I had with a group of DBA regarding what are the things we do that have the most immediate impact improving performance of SQL Server. We talked about optimizing TempDB and defragmenting data internally in SQL Server. A couple of other things that came to the top […]

How important is referential integrity? Don’t act so surprised that I even asked the question. I remember a time when SQL Server didn’t support declarative referential integrity. You had to build your own referential integrity by using triggers. Just a note: you can build referential integrity across databases with triggers. I don’t recommend it because of the overhead; but, it […]

How is Your Cloud Usage? Are you spending what you expected on your cloud implementation? This really comes to light when you consider some of the newer features of SQL Server, specifically the ability to backup to the cloud and to put data files on the cloud as well. These types of things can really lead to surprising utilization of […]