Survivor Some might say that holding down a job today is similar to playing the USA reality TV game show "Survivor". For those of you located where the show is not broadcast, Survivor starts with two teams in a remote location where the contestants must survive the elements by building shelter and finding food. Individuals must cooperate in order to […]

Application Performance Optimization – Replication I have been talking about Sharding as a technique for improving application performance. Sharding distributes your data across multiple servers with the intention to allow multiple server to server requests for data. Replication is another technique that is a close cousin to sharding. Replication is a term that is well understood for Relational database engineers. […]

Application Optimization Techniques – Cache If you haven’t picked up on the trend of the recent topics, I have been looking at different application optimization techniques. We looked at sharding as a way to take advantage of multiple CPUs to handle data persistence to a physical disk. Today I wanted to introduce the concept of Cache. We all know Cache […]

SSWUG TV With Stephen Wynkoop Catch this inteview with SQL Server MVP Denny Cherry. Watch the Show Sharding Techniques Sharding doesn’t have to be performed inside a data engine. In fact, a relational data engine may be sharded externally, just as easily as any other data storage technique. I received an Email from Liran who has written extensively on the […]

SSWUG TV With Stephen Wynkoop What, Big Data? Check out the insights from MVP Stephen Wynkoop on Big Data. Watch the Show Sharding Relational Database Architects have utilized the concepts of Sharding for years. Sharding is a popular term which is used to take an object, and break it down into it’s component properties. For example, SQL Server uses a […]

SQL Server Install Without OS Page File What is the impact, advantage or disadvantage when installing SQL Server on a windows machine that does not have a swap file for virtual memory? When optimizing a SQL Server, one of the things you audit is the weight of paging, swapping memory to disk to make room for other work, to determine […]

JSON Compared to XML XML is a much older specification and has been used for over a decade. JSON is much newer, requiring a much smaller string to define an object and the data the string contains. XML was designed to define, organize and contain data. JSON was designed to pass objects from one process to another in the form […]

Will JSON Replace XML? JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a technique for passing structured data across processes in the form of a string. This technique results in the ability to pass JSON data across network protocols that prefer string traffic, such as HTTP. Data can be serialized into a JSON string much the same as XML. The key difference is […]

Covering Index vs. Indexed View A covering index and an Indexed View are two different techniques for solving the same problem; performance needed when retrieving data from an table or view that has too much overhead for retrieving a subset of the possible data. Both techniques operate as a virtual table if they contain the necessary data required by queries. […]

2012 Topics Survey Here is your opportunity to help determine SSWUG courses for 2012. Click Here to take an online survey. It’s quick, easy, and you will be eligible for some pretty cool free stuff. War Story Our War Story newsletter didn’t distribute well yesterday. If this is a duplicate for some of you, my apologies. I’m not sure how […]