Ingenious or Outrageous Thoughts As I was reviewing my thoughts and responses today on the “Ingenious or Outrageous” editorial from yesterday I started thinking about the bigger issue. Many times we try to find ways around the way things are designed in tools such as SQL Server because they don’t behave the way we want them to. I used to […]

Choosing a Cloud Provider When it comes to selecting who you’ll be working with as a cloud provider (assuming you will be), what are the different components you’ll be looking for, and how will you evaluate them? For those that have been following along, we moved quite a bit of the infrastructure for SSWUG to the cloud and learned some […]

Ingenious or Outrageous I came across a posting today where Dan Ryan came up with an idea of data rules validation using an Indexed View and a table containing two rows. He demonstrated using this technique to enforce a business rule against a parent/child table relationship. The parent and child tables both have a status flag. The rule states that […]

Architectural Change I was talking with a colleague recently about how architectures have changed over the last decade, and how that change has brought about a lot of successes and failures. The discussion continued to come back to business rules and performance. Coming from a SQL Server background I liked the ability to store my business rules close to my […]

Password Security Feedback It seems many agree on the increasing complexity needed when working with passwords, security questions and general access privileges. I’ve heard from many of you that you’re facing similar issues not only with database access of course, but also with application and network security in general. One thing that seems to be lagging in this regard is […]

Clustered SQL Server Service Won’t Start I had the joy of moving the Master Database Files in a clustered SQL Server environment. This isn’t a very hard task to do, normally. Windows Server 2008 has a great utility recently named Windows Cluster Manager which makes managing a failover cluster much easier to get your head around. So, I follow straight […]

When Indexed Views Don’t Work There are two kinds of virtual objects which you can cause to be persisted resulting in faster query performance; views and computed columns. By default views and computed columns are simply pre-defined SQL queries that are not realized until they are executed. However, if you create an index on a view or a computed column, […]

What IS A *SSWUG.ORG* Virtual Conference?? We’ve just announced our virtual conference for the Fall and I have had a bunch of questions about what we’re doing, how it’s different from the other "virtual conferences" out there. First, we’re all about the content. Period. If you take a look, you’ll see that we’re totally focused on content that you can […]

$$SWYNK$$ Reader Feedback Mark – Set NOCOUNT ON I believe it faster because it avoids extra trips to the client and back for each row count message since I believe that data is sent separately from the results for each and every row count. Prabhu – Continuous Integration I am a Program Director specializing in large scale implementation of ERP […]

Is It Time to Update Password Policies? With recent breaches, there is talk that password policies (and security in general) are in need of updates. Specifically, the trend to tie together accounts needs to be changed, and the answers provided along with security questions need to be re-thought. There have been several articles of late recommending that, first, you unlink […]