Security is often a key component to a computer system. It is often separated into two components: 1) Authentication – am I who I say I am?; and 2) What am I allowed to do once authenticated? From an application perspective, once I am authenticated we check the roles in which I am a member. Then in our code, for […]

Today I would like to consider the concept of Many to Many relationships as they are implemented in Entity Framework. First let’s start with defining a Many to Many relationship with an example of a school which has students, teachers and courses. A student may have 1 to many courses. A course may have one or more students. Each course […]

What sport best describes your IT processes? Perhaps it looks like a Nascar race. Lots of wrecks, periods of slowing down, and exciting sprints when everything is working well. Things break down, everything is re-aligned, and racing begins again. Perhaps you’re more like a marathon. Everyone is moving right along…probably faster than the average human can perform at their top […]

When tuning a database environment for performance, Jim has found contradicting advice for configuring SQL Server for parallel performance. Jim writes: The question that plagues me is what to do about parallelism in an OLTP environment. I know two eminent SQL Server experts that take polar opposite views on the issue. The one expert says that the "Cost Threshold for […]

When should you start tuning a database query? I ask this question as a follow-on to my editorial yesterday, where I recommend tuning your database first, then look into tuning your queries. Tuning your database may help multiple queries perform better. In a complex query based on a highly normalized database it is not uncommon to require joins to many […]

I’ve been reading some blogs and editorials regarding the use of query hints; primarily NOLOCK. Many of the opinions written state that query hints should be used much less as query optimization improves, or other methods are developed replacing them. The primary exception for using NOLOCK was in those situations where you have a reporting database, and there is no […]

CAP is a database persistence strategy embraced by most NoSQL storage engines. ACID is the most common persistence strategy used by relational database engines. These acronyms define two different approaches to persisting data. CAP represents three goals of data persistence Consistency Availability Partitioning Simplistically, you can fully implement two of the three goals of CAP in any system. There are […]

Many times I have been working on a project, and the first thing my mind starts with is how to build it so that it is future proof. We often want our work to last a long, long time. It’s part of the reason we like doing software in the first place. In contrast, I am constantly reminding myself to […]

Here’s an interesting scenario we all face at one time or another. Your application runs fine until you increase the load. It stands up pretty good with 4 or 5 processes. But, when you get to that 6th process, things begin to degrade. Each additional process, from this point on, increases the degradation exponentially. At some point, nothing is working, […]

Jet Brains creates a lot of my favorite tools and utilities. I really like Resharper. Lots of developers don’t like it. So, it’s a kind of personal thing. Then there is the Team City build suite. Super easy to learn and use. Works great in windows and Linux. They even have a tool for tracking work , much like an […]