I’m a huge fan of Watson and the technology behind it. This is an interesting partnership on a few different levels – and it raises some questions as well. Essentially, the overall partnership between IBM and Salesforce is one of adding new intelligence and machine learning to customers that are shared between the two providers. Presumably, you can combine the […]

There have been a lot of comments regarding the reason behind storing undefined data in your SQL Server in the first place. I think those are exceptional, reasonable questions you should ask yourself for any data you take the time to store. Let me start out by saying that there should be rare cases of unknown or evolving data in […]

Yesterday I presented the problem of a database that has ever evolving data requirements. There are two approaches to handling this kind of problem. The first approach, which is what I implemented, is to use the database the way it was designed. If you have new data, it is saved in its own tables, using database normalization, just as you […]

Self-driving cars, hosted and shared environments, apps, tools and sites. We expect them to work, work correctly, and work always. Is this too high a standard? Now, before I am accused of excusing providers, I’m not. I expect that Amazon’s S3 systems will remain online and available as advertised. I expect that Microsoft’s login services and email and such will […]

Recently I was involved in a project for a system that has ever expanding requirements. That’s really cool. It shows you that the product you created has proven so useful to its users that they want to extend it further to handle other aspects of their business. In this project there are a few features that are similar but different. […]

There is a free webcast today – and you have time to register (assuming you’re catching this in the morning, or want to watch on-demand a bit later). Here’s the description of the session: Data science is becoming an increasingly influential practice within organizations. In this session we will cover how to build data science teams, with a focus on […]

Today I’m referring back to an old technique that still has some value when it comes to optimizing queries. If you are consistent in the order you join tables, and in the order of columns you use for filtering tables, you can sometimes gain a more optimal performance on your queries. Why would this be important? Most of your SQL […]

Increasingly having conversations (including one on FB in the last couple of days) about automation and robots and what it means to jobs and duties… so I’m curious what you think of it all? To me, it seems pretty likely (unavoidable?) that things that can be decided based on data will some of the most prime – and learning from […]

You have worked hard to protect your SQL Server and the databases it hosts. You have built barriers against SQL Injection, and limited the capabilities for database clients to the limited set of permissions required for the work they are responsible to accomplish. Isn’t that enough? For some companies that may be adequate coverage. Remember, however, that it is estimated […]

We have some really cool things happening with the upcoming virtual conference – I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to check out the site, but there are already some very cool sessions listed. We’re setting up the event so that sessions cover as many varied topics, ideas and information as possible – right now (this may increase) we’re […]