I read a great article from Glenn Berry about applying (or not applying) patches to your systems. There are clearly implications of whether you apply updates or not, and Glenn does an excellent job outlining key points. It’s a hard decision only because it can mean some pretty significant work on your part to make sure updates are clean and […]

Microsoft Vision of Software As A Service is Taking Form I was reading Stephen Wynkoop’s editorial from a couple days ago about some of the new features being brought into Azure. Surprised was I to find FoxPro in that list. Not long ago Microsoft announced it would no longer be releasing any new updates for Visual FoxPro. When you think […]

Big Data is so many things to so many people. To the boss, it’s predictive information. To database professionals, it’s a lot of things together – velocity, volume, all those things that have come to define it officially. More and more I see projects struggling because the chasm between what one group defines it as vs what another defines it […]

Scorecards for Small Businesses In the mid-1980s I worked for a small non-profit organization with an annual budget just under $250k. We worked hard as an organization to develop the equivalent of Scorecards as a way to track our goals and accomplishments as they applied to the purpose and intentions of the organization. Because we didn’t have much more than […]

Traditional suggestions for running your systems included modeling your disk usage and other resources so you can predict your system growth, utilization and overall requirements as time goes on. I’ve been working with a couple of systems for just this type of profiling. It’s been interesting to see that the traditional model of "we’ve grown at this rate before, we […]

Scorecards – Why does every BI tool have them? I came across the concept of Key Performance indicators and Scorecards in the Harvard Business Review, and a book I read by one of the professors on the topic, about 10 years ago. The concept so intrigued me, I was talking with a few co-workers about starting a company based around […]

Database Sharding/Partitioning Overview Back when Microsoft SQL Server 2005 was still in Community Technical Preview stage, months before the release, some of the SQL team working with integrating XML into SQL Server released a white paper on TechNet reviewing the methodology behind creating indexes on the contents of the XML data type. I read the paper back then and was […]

Access and Foxpro Moving to Azure I was surprised to hear late last week that Microsoft’s Access and FoxPro lines are being migrated to Azure offerings, much like the HDInsight and various database and database offerings from Microsoft. I initially had a hard time understanding the "Why" of the change, but it does make sense. If you think about how […]

Securing SQL Assets We talk a lot about securing your database assets in SQL Server. We cover concepts such as authentication techniques and which one is the best fit. Utilizing Schemas to separate ownership of database objects. Creating groups and users to manage permissions for objects more easily. Granting and revoking of privileges reducing the vulnerability for database consumers. It […]

So, Exactly What IS Personally Identifiable Information? I think it’s clear that things are changing. There was an article and project several years back to determine whether you could figure out who someone was by their search terms. Google had published a scrubbed listing of search terms with no (at the time) personally identifiable information. The purpose was to start […]