As with any creative role, managers who are hiring for User Experience positions will often sift through a vast number of CVs and portfolios before a candidate even makes it through the door. As a potential employee it’s your job to impress, sell yourself to the company and most importantly give some insight into... read more
What’s SQL Data Mask? SQL Data Mask is the latest product from Foundry to be graduated to the prototype phase. It copies your database while anonymizing personal data. You can use it to mask your databases right now, free of charge, and there’s a full tutorial below. You can also look at the upcoming... read more
On Friday, March 10, I attended the Working Effectively with Legacy Code workshop hosted by Michael Feathers, along with a few other members of my team. We maintain a difficult legacy code base and we were eager to do some practice and learn some useful techniques. The most important lesson I learned is that any... read more
Foundry is Redgate’s research and development division. We develop products and technologies for the Microsoft data platform. Each project progresses through Foundry’s four-stage product development process: Research, Concept, Prototype, Beta. At each stage, the Foundry team is exploring the scope and potential for Redgate to develop a product. One of our projects, data masking,... read more
In Foundry – Redgate’s research division – we’re focused on exploring new products and technologies for the Microsoft data platform. Over the last few months, we’ve been taking a close look at the problems people face when auditing and meeting regulatory compliance for SQL Server. An introduction to compliance and SQL Server Our research has given... read more
Even with the right tooling, it can be tricky figuring out how to get an automated database deployment pipeline up and running. That’s why each month we host an hour-long DevOps webinar with an end-to-end demo of our database automation tools, showing how to check a database change into version control, automate the build... read more
In this post, I’d like to introduce you to the Universal Architecture idea described by J.B. Rainsberger in the podcast Unit Testability and the Universal Architecture. Everyone wants to deliver software that works and delivers value to our customers. That’s a fact! Everyone wants our software to be easy to change and maintain. That’s obvious! Unfortunately, we... read more
Implementing Agile working practices reminds me of Communism – if we just did it properly, everything would work perfectly! All projects would be a dream to work on, all deliveries would be early, the customers would get exactly what they needed, and so on. However, perfection is the enemy of progress. We’ve implemented an... read more
When you’re hard at work, it’s all too easy to make a mistake as you rush to get a job done. Say, for example, you have a QA database you need to get rid of. You run a query to drop it and then… oh no! You’ve accidentally run it in Production. Your day... read more
In SQL Server 2016, Microsoft introduced support for system-versioned temporal tables. Temporal tables are a database feature that provides information about data stored at any point in time, rather than only the data that is correct at that specific moment. Why are temporal tables needed? Simply put, they make it much easier to analyze... read more
