Accidental DBA Tip – Max Value of Identity Column SQL Server databases love to have an incrementing column as a clustered index value. This may be the primary key of a table or not, depending on the need. However, a system assigned incrementing column is recommended for the clustered index. Typically, the data in this type of column is generated […]

SQL Fire – SQL at Web Scale Most of the options allowing you to take your application to Web Scale are moving away from SQL in some way or another. NoSQL is a major proponent. SQL Fire is a product from VM Ware addressing the issue of SQL at Web Scale. SQL Fire gains web scale performance using Data is […]

Collaboration – Proceed with caution… Mark says, « Proceed with caution » when it comes to collaboration. POSITIVE: I believe it is essential to “collaborate” with those ultimately responsible for creating and administering a system. Creativity is stifled if people are treated like robots with no “ownership” of the systems with which they are assigned. I have a pet peeve […]

Dot Net Interlocked I continue to be affirmed that the ability to code multi-threaded applications is an essential skill for developers today. Most computers ship with multiple cores. Even tablets and phones are shipping with multiple cores or CPUs. Your app has increased benefit when it is capable of running multiple threads. There are times when you wish to share […]

Have You Heard About Blu? It’s pretty cool some of the refinements and outright new things that are coming out for data professionals. I’ve been talking with more and more people from across the spectrum of database systems and the capabilities and functionality are really amazing. We have a free webcast happening on the 12th that goes into some of […]

Collaboration How important is collaboration to the quality of your software? Does collaboration impact your teams in a positive way? Are there negative impacts through collaboration such as compromise in order to reach consensus? I suppose you can guess my perspective from the questions I used to introduce the conversation. I find collaboration to be a great tool for building […]

Windows Power Management Configuration Windows power optimization features can save you a lot of money.; it can also cause you a lot of grief. Here’s an example. A while back a colleague of mine was having difficulty with a Windows 2012 server installation that would work fine for days. Then, for no apparent reason, connection to the machine could no […]

Cruft When I started my first internship in college my job was to go through all the jobs configured on a midrange computer system. It was a smaller computer with limited disk space. They were looking for older programs that could be removed because they were no longer in use. I spent months learning the programming tools and documented thousands […]

FatDB – Windows Based No-SQL Engine I regularly watch for non-relational emerging technologies as I experience greater needs for large scale, high performance data access. Recently I came across FatDB as a framework for NoSQL and much more. One of the things that sets it apart from most other NoSQL platforms is that it is first written to operate natively […]

Business Intelligence Markup Language (Biml) I have used SQL Server Integration Services since it was released with Microsoft SQL Server 2005. I found it to be a really great tool in a lot of ways, yet found myself moving to more traditional code written in C#, driven by SSIS or some other scheduling technology. The key reasons for this were […]