How are your ADO.Net skills? Many times you are not required to write code directly in ADO.Net because you are using frameworks that handle the database communication on your behalf. Entiry Framwork, Linq to SQL, nHibernate, net Tiers, Dapper DB, and many other libraries and frameworks handle the database communication for you. Then there are those times when it makes […]

I think we need a new term for the Postal Services of the world. We used to call them Snail Mail because it took a while for your letter to be delivered; especially when compared to using Email. Today I came to realize that I now consider Email to be Snail Mail. Texting on my cell phone, using instant messaging, […]

Reading Paul Hebhardt’s editorial from SQL Central yesterday I became aware that SQL Azure now supports real world Backup and Restore. Previously we were restricted to simply performing a full point in time backup to blob storage. Now SQL Azure has plans that include real backup and restore capabilities. According to MSDN there are three new SQL Azure tiers with […]

The Problem with Processing at Light Speed We’ve come so far with being able to work with data loads, figure out what we target to learn and then be processing those workflows at break-neck speed. It’s really quiet remarkable how quickly information can be processed, especially once you’ve identified the processes and rules you want to apply. Of course the […]

The model database is a standard database created for every instance of SQL Server, just like Master, MSDB and TempDB. Unlike the other system databases, model is not used frequently. In fact, it is only used when a new database is created. When you create a new database, it clones the model database. So, as you can see, every user […]

Big Data Ethics and DBAs For many, many years we’ve spent time here on SSWUG.org talking about ethics. We even went so far as to create a community-based code of ethics for DBAs. It went repeatedly through many revisions and has "rested" since. (Here’s a link to the finalized look at the statement) Wired just published an interesting article on […]

Gregg Keizer writes about a new model for releasing Microsoft Windows software beginning when Windows 10 hits the market. His editorial is based on input from the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2014 where Michael Silver and Stephen Kleynhans review the plan for future Windows releases. It appears that there is an intention to release updates to the Windows operating system monthly in […]

Mail Merge through Email is a really cool technology. Using Mail Merge you can create the contents any number of different ways. You can do office automation, use third party controls, or even roll your own templates with whatever logic works for your application. The key is that you are using data from your systems to generate the contents of […]

Today I am catching up on my backlog of reader response emails for various topics. Mark – Traits of a Good Software Developer I think your point about passion is key. One note I might add to your thoughts is how to encourage passion in a development team. Even if a team is given freedom of scope for “passionate” work, […]

A while back I wrote about using null as a third value for a bit data type in SQL Server. The problem is not that storage doesn’t work. The problem is that often those bit columns are used to identify state, and allowing null values does not enable indexing, resulting in slower query performance in some cases. One such case […]