Most database engines have some form of security built in. The security is designed to authenticate the client credentials and to grant or revoke rights against the database objects. Most engines have schemas owning database objects to which users are assigned. Encryption is sometimes included in the engine to product the database contents under different circumstances. Years ago I used […]

Do we really need to differentiate the type of object resulting in a dataset based on consumer usage? Most of the arguments I’ve heard for identifying the kind of object are based around the consumer, such as a reporting tool. Let’s consider tables and views first. The reason we put together views is so that the consumer does not need […]

Aaron shares a pragmatic approach to naming. Based on his response it would appear there is still a great value in how we name our objects. Aaron writes: I think the names we give to things that our applications are built around are really important because these things we created will/should be the language of our system and how we […]

Today I’m circling back around to an old conversation about naming conventions. I’m going to focus on SQL objects, but the concept still applies to any other application that names objects or variables. Over that last few months I’ve come across some interesting naming conventions for SQL Objects. Some are old school and others are new to me. For example, […]

The need to evaluate an expression at runtime is an old one and has been addressed many different ways. Today Gilles writes with links to many of the current tools or examples available on the web. Gilles writes: That’s a common question but not a so simple one! 🙂 In short you have to use a lexer and a parser, […]

Yesterday I introduced the concept of evaluating a mathematical expression using a C# technique that converts the string to values and operations that can be performed. The code that performs the calculation uses expressions in the form of postfix notation (sometimes called Polish Notation) simplifying the calculation process. One difficulty is that we are taught to write equations using infix […]

C# does not have a method evaluate the results of a mathematical expression contained in a string. If it did, it would be similar to evaluating a formula you might enter in a cell in a spreadsheet. When the contents of the cell are evaluated, the contents are translated into a series of math variables and operations that can be […]

Placing your SQL Server files in Azure Blob Storage is a new feature released in SQL Server 2014. Why would you consider using this service. Fast access to files is commonly an essential performance requirement for databases; that’s why we most often use SAN storage for the speed it provides. It turns out there are two different ways you can […]

What is your preferred role when working with databases? Do you want to be the guru with all the different techniques for database design and optimization. Do you want to be the optimization wizard able to get the right set of indexes or optimize query performance? Do you want to be the database manager making sure people have only the […]

Yesterday I presented a case for not storing BLOB data in SQL Server. Dave Shared in the comments an good case against my generalized position against using blobs. His primary concern was the sprawl of files by storing each instance of BLOB data as a separate file. His product was a self-contained image management tool. By using SQL Server as […]