The USA released a comprehensive national health insurance enrollment system within the last year as a method for implementing the new laws and regulations for health insurance. The release was poorly received because the application didn’t work effectively on many fronts. I do not know any specifics about the application. But there is a lot that can be known due […]

This is probably old news to many of you. But I am optimistic about the Microsoft approach to make Dot Net software available to be hosted outside the Microsoft set of operating systems. They are starting with Dot Net Core, a set of libraries of shared capabilities found in all implementations of Dot Net. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/11/12/net-core-is-open-source.aspx There are a couple of […]

Data retention is one of my favorite database topics because it has one of the greatest impacts on database performance. It also has a great impact on the capabilities of a company to fully utilize information for profit and efficeiency. Keeping too much data causes you database performance to degrade, increases the length of maintenance windows, and can even result […]

Recently, while attending a local PASS presentation, I had a conversation with a young person who was building their skills as a SQL Server DBA. Their company is growing and their desire to use technology efficiently has been identified as an important component of that growth. Their company has purchased a licensing program with Microsoft providing them with SharePoint. Management […]

There are way too many layers of separation in this application. A single change takes hours because the change has to be performed in so many places. The application was built using a large number of layers so that they could be replaced with something else at a later time. The problem is that we never have time to replace […]

Language features like those in R, which is designed to work with vectors, have often be performed using traditional SQL syntax. While SQL Syntax is not designed for statistical analysis the set nature of the language does lend it to solving some statistical problems. Perhaps this might even be a more efficient solution if large amounts of data must be […]

This last year I focused on perfecting Web API skills in the Dot Net framework. I chose Web API because of its ability to create a RESTful service interface accessible from many different consumer platforms, languages, and operating systems. Microsoft uses the Model and Controller portions of their MVC implementation to easily implement a RESTful service, which may be self-hosted […]

Today I have been looking at the extension in Entity Framework (EF) 6 allowing the auditing of the generated SQL and it’s execution. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/dn469464.aspx This is built into the EF library allowing the developer to intercept, log, modify or even cancel the generated SQL code. This can be used to solve any number of problems. If you need to trace […]

When it comes to programming, I no longer have any idea how quickly or accurately I can type. I also have a reduced memory of the objects I use on a daily basis, either written my myself, or contained in libraries I frequent. Why am I able to get away with this reduced set of skills? We have all come […]

Does it matter what order you join tables in an SQL Server query? Not unless you use the command SET FORCEPLAN ON. If you use FORCEPLAN SQL Server will join the tables in the order you specify regardless of Query Optimizer calculations. If you do not specify that you wish to override the query optimizer, by setting FORCEPLAN on, which […]