For a while now, I’ve been running into a series of situations where, when we’re helping a client with a data environment, the success of the project comes down to making data providers talk to each other, preferably seemlessly. This can be any combination of things. From applications from third parties that gather and store information and have “claimed” that […]

For nearly any engine persisting data, it is helpful, if not essential, to understand the internal workings of the engine, in order to maintain good performance over time. That’s a bold statement. So, let me give some evidence to back it up. Let’s talk about SQL Server specifically for right now. Here are some things that if you know about […]

Continuing with my thoughts on skills you may wish to acquire this year I started thinking about the skills used by a Database Architect (DBA). Previously we looked at skills for the production DBA, those people who keep the lights on, and the data pure. A Database Architect, in contrast, is more focused on the actual schema of the data. […]

SQL Server 2005 was a huge release for Microsoft and this SQL Server world we live in in general. It was stable, worked well and had wide application support. Over the years, updates and tweaks and so-on have been well documented and the experience base with 2005 is extensive. It’s also been simmering on the radar security-wise and, with the […]

Interesting Lessons Learned in the Cloud As we’ve been going through this conversion of SSWUG.org to a new model and platform, we’ve been converting just about everything along the way to new systems, new databases, new front- and back-end technologies. It’s been a very complex project, by far the most complex I’ve worked through with the site in the entire […]

Starting a new year is a good time to assess what skills you need to acquire, and begin planning to accomplish those tasks. For those persons working as a DBA, the options are really cool. Sharepoint continues to be a tool many businesses use. However, because it stores lots of BLOB data, it takes a different kind of management to […]

In preparation for this New Years Day I was reviewing some of our online video with Stephen Wynkoop and Kevin Kline, and was reminded of some of the innovative features released in SQL Server, that, not necessarily being storage engine extensions, are radical in the flexibility we have for managing our data environments. I’m speaking of the hybrid capabilities of […]

The performance of Virtual Servers seem to increase with every release. The base operating systems are better tuned for hosting virtual servers, and the various VS software tools continue to improve in flexibility, manageability, and performance. Combined with a SAN, virtual servers make a great environment for keeping you servers running. I remember when virtual servers first came out for […]

Covering Indexes is a topic I like to return to every once in a while. As we get new readers with less SQL experience this can be a helpful technology to understand. For any relational engine, a covering index is an index that contains all the data necessary to service an SQL statement. Let’s say you have a table with […]

Temporal data is going to be an integrated part of the SQL Server engine as of 2016. What does that mean for you, the consumer, the writer of SQL Queries? It means that you turn on temporal behavior through DDL commands (Data Definition Language) used to define your tables. Then, you use an extension of the DML (Data Manipulation Language) […]