Let me start out today with an apology to Martin Fowler, having incorrectly identifying him yesterday in my editorial as Robert Fowler, and send a thank you to Jason for bringing this to my attention. As I continue to research this concept of workflow patterns I am beginning to ask myself, “what is the definition of a software pattern”? I […]

I have been working designing rules engines for years. In many ways a rules engine may be similar, or even overlap with a workflow engine. Often you can use a workflow engine to write rules because they follow similar patterns of processing. I am also an advocate of using software development patterns where they are the best fit. Today I […]

Every time I am involved in a project where database changes are packaged and scripted as some event such as Systems Integration Testing or User Acceptance Testing begins, I am reminded of pitfalls inherent in this strategy. Changes that have been made in an individual sandbox (if there are any) or in a development environment, are often missed or forgotten, […]

Fail Fast is a term often heard in the agile community. They are completely serious when making this statement. Failure is not only acknowledged, it is embraced. The old story about Thomas Edison is that he not only figured out how to create a light bulb, he also found out many different ways that fail to make a working light […]

Index merging is an implementation strategy in an SQL Engine, enhancings query performance when no single index is available to resolve the requirements of a query. Index merging is really pretty simple. It works a lot like joining two different tables. Since an index is much like a table, it can be utilized in a similar fashion. Let’s use an […]

How are you testing your mobile applications? With the rapid increase this is a growing requirement. Depending on your implementation some of the testing can be performed using emulators, etc. Ultimately you have to test on target devices. Are you using any automated software? How about unit testing? Perhaps, with applications using multiple layers, or a hybrid approach, there are […]

Much of the energy from the Microsoft team for database services has been targeted toward the BI solutions since 2008. We’ve seen things such as PowerPivot, data warehouse appliances, Column Stores and much more. Recently we have been seeing some powerful performance enhancements in the SQL database engine as well with in memory tables, and column store indexes. Still, it […]

Recently exposed is the fact that drives from many manufacturers have been altered, allowing covert programs to execute simply by accessing the hard disk controller. This is the kind of thing alluded to in spy novels. Now it has been exposed as fact by reliable resources. Until there is a certification process that a disk controller has not been modified, […]

You don’t have a data warehouse. Maybe you have a reporting database with some de-normalized data marts. Or, at best you have a reporting database populated from transactions on your OLAP database. Now you have need to produce a report most easily calculated in a data warehouse using statistical queries rather than standard SQL. Where do you begin? What options […]

Are you keeping up with updates for your SQL Engine? I know this is not the easiest thing to do. It is difficult to find a time when the databases are not in use, or you invest a lot of money having failover systems allowing you to perform updates. Still, the risk of not applying service releases to your database […]