If you read over the reviews of the BI conference last week, you see that there were high hopes from some for a mobile solution. I thought it was intriguing to read the comments though and see that not everyone agrees that that’s the next frontier for BI. What do you think should be next? Personally, I think mobile is […]

I stumbled into a bit of a debate about this where several people were getting a bit heated about where the line is drawn in terms of when and what you denormalize for your systems. Traditionally, when people talk about undoing all of that normalization work you’ve done, they answer with "it depends." It depends on the types of reporting, […]

What’s QUOTED_IDENTIFIERS All About? Yesterday I wrote about having to use brackets to get SQL Server to accept my DML commands to CREATE and DROP objects using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). Others wrote they had not experienced this and could not reproduce the behavior. Today, I also was unable to reproduce the behavior. I can’t say why SSMS was […]

I had a really interesting conversation with a fellow attendee today at the SQLIntersection/DevIntersection show here in Vegas. We got talking about the cloud. He’d just attended a Cloud Basics session and had come away pretty sure he would never use the cloud for his organization’s applications. I was pretty surprised! Not that I think the cloud is the be-all, […]

[Read Between the Brackets] I’ve been working in SQL Server Management Studio 2012 today and found something rather annoying. I tried to execute an SQL Command DROP PROCEDURE someProcedure and received an error warning stating that my syntax was incorrect somewhere at ‘ ‘. I have two observations: What a useless error message The problem was that SSMS expected DROP […]

Kevin Kline and Sumeet Bansal presented a session talking about a very high volume customer and some lessons-learned regarding working in this environment. The volume was such that the standard things you might think about, from spindles to CPU to RAM just became ineffective. I learned a lot about the physical limitations of hardware (it’s going to be very tough […]

Business Changes Moving to Software as a Service What kinds of change can a business expect moving to Software as a Service? Perhaps a look at Microsoft Azure may give us some ideas. Before I dig in to changes too much, let me remind us that the concept of timeshare utilization of large resources is not a new concept. Mainframe […]

Developer Changes Moving to Software as a Service The hurdles for software developers to jump while transitioning to Software as a Service are not very high. Again I’m looking specifically at Azure due to the simplicity Microsoft has put into the platform. Still, Azure is not the only game in town. Tools used for developing code for Azure are the […]

If we continue as we are, just building these really great "crowd-sourced" databases and big data data warehouses, we’ll end up with a bit of the wild-wild-west. I think if just let things happen, they will… and perhaps not in ways that everyone will tolerate. It’s easy to say that we should let things evolve and they’ll turn out OK. […]

Administrator Changes Moving to Software as a Service As an administrator of databases and software for your company, moving to Software as a Service will have a small impact on your skill set for development tools, processes, testing, and security. Let’s consider Azure as the predominant host of Dot Net Software as a Service hosts. Microsoft provides within their development […]