Date Formatting is very helpful. While it is not always the preferred thing to do in your database, there is native support built in. SQL Server allows you to convert or cast a date into a string value, and during the casting to provide a formatting method. The formatting is specified by providing an integer value. Following is a query […]

Reading Stephen’s editorial a about the viability of the SLA process, I began thinking about the RFP process as well. Both processes have something in common. The worst case scenario is that the contracts result in a pre-determined scape goat to blame when things go badly. The best case scenario provides guidelines for how both parties will behave and perform. […]

TDE vs. Cloud Provider Encryption of Database Information I wanted to share some information I sent over to a reader about TDE vs. Azure vs. provider-encrypted databases. Specifically how do you compare, and how do you choose. This particular reader is in the healthcare space, but the information is more about my own experiences and choices, and I thought I […]

Here’s Accidental DBA Tip. Many times you are looking for where an object such as a table or stored procedure are used. Sometimes you can use dependency DMVs or sp_depends. However, those are not always reliable because the object you may be looking for could have been deleted, or not created in the correct order so the linkage is tracked. […]

Is an SLA Passe? (Spoiler: Yes.) The question of SLAs being helpful, at the hosting of your servers level anyway, is, I believe a done deal. It’s not helpful, it’s not useful and it’s simply going to give you false hopes of infrastructure, whereas you could be putting in place more robust options that would take care of failures by […]

I was listening to a radio show this morning where the topic was about things we do that trigger other actions you would not think could or would happen. When it comes to computer systems, this is a regular occurrence. Things are often tied together in ways you may not anticipate. In SQL Server, a fun example is the use […]

Total cost of ownership is frequently used to justify the extra cost of hosted services. Steve has been comparing different hosting services for SQL Server, Amazon and Microsoft Azure. His presentation should encourage you to really take into consideration all of the costs involved. Hosting services will tell you that they handle software updates, backups, installation, maintenance, etc. So, you […]

I have been working on a project, recently, containing a number of large logic controllers that must perform a lot of work very quickly. As a result, I do not have the luxury of instantiating them each time they are needed. Instead I have a singleton of each controller. The net result is that I cannot use any local variables […]

Licensing Costs with SQL Server – Did You Know? It’s not easy to work through all of the costs for cloud providers. WIth the way things are priced out based on services, bandwidth usage, storage and the like, it’s a potentially pretty dizzying array of options and costs. It’s important, however, to make sure you think through the core costs […]

Cloud computing; what is it? The concept continually changes. I have been working in cloud development technologies for a number of years, creating systems that scale auto-magically across many servers such that an application has no real awareness of where data or code resides. Microsoft has made this cloud computing even easier in the open source Azure project Orleans. Since […]