$$SWYNK$$ Are you Ready for IPv6? According to information I gleaned from IPv6.com, the new internet protocol has a lot more going on than expanding the number of available network addresses. It has features enabling new hardware and software to work more efficiently. Summarizing their site, they list 10 key improvements over the 30 year old IPv4 internet protocol. • […]

SeleccTViews With Stephen Wynkoop Watch as Scott Gode from Azaleos talks with Stephen about gaps between private cloud systems and Office 365. IDENTITY Results Clarification I received an Email correcting my description on the behavior of both SCOPE_IDENTITY and @@IDENTITY. Also, there was a twitter response regarding the behavior of IDENT_CURRENT as well. Don Writes: In Getting rid of @@Identity […]

My Bet is That You’re a Hoarder…Me Too. I don’t know if you’ve seen the series of shows on a couple of different cable networks on hoarding, but they’re pretty interesting looks at the psychological triggers people go through in "collecting" – it seems like so many of the folks that are facing this say something along the lines of […]

$$SWYNK$$ Replace @@IDENTITY Yesterday we talked about the difference between the behavior of @@IDENTITY and SCOPE_IDENTITY(), especially as it relates to triggers. Today I’ll present an option for returning assigned IDENTITY values without relying on global variables or system functions, which are not guaranteed to behave as you may wish. @@IDENTITY is a global server wide variable returning the last […]

Rapid Deployment Tools – What Are Yours? I had a great discussion with an Azure MVP today – we’ll have more on that as we get the show produced and ready to go. We talked though about deployment times and the impact that the cloud is having on expectations for getting new databases up and running. It hits me that […]

$$SWYNK$$ Trigger Tension You have a process that inserts a record into a table. You also have a trigger that fires after the insert event on the same table. Inside that trigger, you insert a record into a second table. When you attempt to get the identity value assigned from the insert, what value will be returned? The identity value […]

Your Future as a DBA? Secure. Bright even. But perhaps not for the reasons you anticipate! I’ve been talking with more and more DBAs about the fact that the architecture and performance side of things is becoming increasingly important. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s not because of current applications support, but rather design of applications to support mobile devices and cloud-based solutions. […]

Covering Index Today I decided to talk about covering indexes. I was pleased to find there has been a lot of recent activity on covering indexes posted here at www.sswug.org. Simply go to our site and type “Covering Index” in the search box. You’ll find many posts. For our Accidental DBA friends, or those new to relational databases, a Covering […]

$$SWYNK$$ Version Control and Version Differentiation I stated last week that a key reason I don’t care for a number of software development tools is that they do not lend themselves to the ability to integrate with existing version control products allowing you to see in a human readable form the modifications from one version to the next. Most diff […]

At Times, I Fear the Cloud I’m not an alarmist by nature. So I bring up the following not as a "pile-on" but rather as a "you should know about this…" Did you hear about the power outages from Amazon and Microsoft’s European cloud services? Sigh. It’s real, and it shouldn’t have happened in my humble opinion. It’s not that […]