Today my son asked me, “What is fahrenheit?” I was explaining to him that Fahrenheit is a scale used to measure temperature. There are different scales. The scientific community generally prefers celsius. In farenheigt, water freezes at 32 degrees. In celsius, water freezes at 0 degrees. So, a scale is a tool to compare things, and demonstrate the difference. A […]

I find it interesting that modern applications, built using stateless architectures, usually maintain state. Let me explain what I’m getting at. I like to play solitaire on my cell phone. I can hide the app, close the app, or even power down my phone. If I return to the application at a later time, it comes back to where I […]

Reading Steve Jones editorial today reminded me about protecting data on mobile devices. I have observed that many developers are moving to laptop computers. In my case, the reason is portability. I may be moving to work with another developer at their desk, in a conference room, or even offsite, or at home. Like many developers, I have things on […]

A couple decades ago I remember a mentor telling me that programmers would no longer be needed within 10 years or so. Everything would be encapsulated in objects, and we would simply plug objects together to fulfill our software requirements. Twenty years later I find myself still writing the same code over and over again. Tonight I am asking myself […]

John D. Rockefeller, was an Ohio native in the USA. He started Standard Oil. At one time he the world’s richest man and first ever American billionaire. This was in the early 1900’s, when a Billion Dollars was much more than we would imagine today. A reporter is said to have asked him, “How much money is enough?” Rockefeller was […]

As I have been reviewing new features being built into SQL Server 2016, I found one I can really appreciate. Stretch Databases. Using stretch database, your data is partitioned according to frequency of access. Data used less frequently is archived onto different storage, isolated from the highly accessed data. The archived storage leverages Azure for reasonable performance at a reduced […]

Last week I wrote about SQL Server 2016. They are adding JSON as a data type. I’m not sure how much value that brings to a relational database engine. Certainly, the capability may be abused, as we have seen in XML. There are many comments in favor of a non-relational type of storage for the purposes of supporting Hierarchical data. […]

SQL Server 2016 is being enhanced to support JSON, much like they did when they added XML capabilities. I find this intriguing. Are they intending that SQL Server be an endpoint for REST clients? That would require endpoints and exposing your database server to consumers. I’m not sure I’m on board. It may save some work…but is it worth the […]

SQL Server 2016 now supports a driver based encryption called Always Encrypted. In essence, columns in your database tables may be encrypted, while working with them as the original un-encrypted data type from your application. The encryption works during the transport of the data from the application to SQL Server. This makes the database behave as fully encrypted when using […]

I was listening to a pod cast from Brent Ozar today, and was reminded of how important it is to organize yourself for success when working with software. Let me ask substantiate that with a question. What was the last time you had to figure something out again, after having figured it out earlier, but forgot how you did it? […]