Tony Davis

Tony Davis is an Editor with Red Gate Software, based in Cambridge (UK), specializing in databases, and especially SQL Server. He edits articles and writes editorials for both the Simple-talk.com and SQLServerCentral.com websites and newsletters, with a combined audience of over 1.5 million subscribers. You can sample his short-form writing at either his Simple-Talk.com blog or his SQLServerCentral.com author page.

As the editor behind most of the SQL Server books published by Red Gate, he spends much of his time helping others express what they know about SQL Server. He is also the lead author of the book, SQL Server Transaction Log Management.

In his spare time, he enjoys running, football, contemporary fiction and real ale.

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04 June 2015
04 June 2015

Test Driving Your Database

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In any engineering project, you can’t avoid testing your product against reality. A friend who once worked at a car design center told me that throughout each development cycle, in adding to a component-testing program with test-rigs and simulations, they would drive each newly-designed automobile down “Dunmore Lane”. This local road was infamous for its … Read more
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07 May 2015
07 May 2015

The Art of the Author

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When tidying out an old cupboard a few weeks ago, one after another I casually tossed outdated, dusty technical books into a recycling box. I paused however, when I reached one particular book, on “ASP for Databases” with which I’d had some editorial involvement. At the time, it had seemed just another book, albeit a … Read more
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11 February 2015
11 February 2015

Questions About SQL Server Transaction Log You Were Too Shy To Ask

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You can give a deep-dive presentation about SQL Server's transaction log, and round it off by inviting questions. Your audience will stare awkwardly at their boots. Afterwards, to your surprise there will be a queue of questioners, and the questions are the ones they were too shy to ask out loud. Tony Davis answers these apparently simple, yet tricky questions.… Read more
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15 January 2015
15 January 2015

Prettier, But Less Usable

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When the original window-based user-interface was first being developed by Palo Alto, the team was driven by the idea that applications must be easy to use, consistent and accessible to all of humanity. This is why every window that opened in all subsequent windowing operating systems, had a rather standard design, with a set of … Read more
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05 November 2014
05 November 2014

PASS Summit 14 Dispatches: Azure Machine Learning

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PASS Summit 14 Day 1 keynote and Joseph Sirosh and Sanjay Somi demo’d Azure Machine Learning (ML) and the drive to ‘democratize’ predictive analytics. The basic idea behind ML is computers learning through “training” how to look for patterns and relationships in complex data, without being explicitly programmed to find a particular “answer”. Through iteration, … Read more
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05 November 2014
05 November 2014

PASS Summit 14 Dispatches: DocumentDB

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During the PASS Summit 14 keynote, TK “Ranga” Rengarajan mentioned briefly Microsoft’s DocumentDB, a new NoSQL database. I was hoping to hear more. It’s an Azure-hosted JSON document data store and seems to be an attempt to marry the schema ‘flexibility’ and easy scalability that developers crave from their databases with the transactional capabilities of … Read more
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23 October 2014
23 October 2014

To PASS Summit and Beyond

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In his recent, successful bid to win election to the PASS board, Grant Fritchey (@GFritchey) opened his campaign statement as follows: The PASS organization changed my life for the better. He goes on to explain how, as a result, he’d now like to help extend the benefits he’s experienced to as many other people as … Read more
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10 October 2014
10 October 2014

Source Code isn't sacred

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A recent, short article on O’Reilly.com, Before You Refactor suggests that if you think you need to rewrite code, you must proceed with caution, do cost-benefit analysis and so on. If you’re still convinced then, at the very least, make the changes in small increments, reusing as much of the existing code, and tests, as … Read more
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18 June 2014
18 June 2014

Database Branching and Merging Strategies

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Source control will allow you to maintain branches in the development of your database, but the subsequent merge isn't pain-free. How, from the practical perspective, can the database developer support the rapid development and delivery of features in an application? Versioning, branching and merging is part of the solution, but what about the rest of the solution?… Read more
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06 June 2014
06 June 2014

We have our standards, and we need them

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The presenter suddenly broke off. He was midway through his section on how to apply to the relational database the Continuous Delivery techniques that allowed for rapid-fire rounds of development and refactoring, while always retaining a “production-ready” state. He sighed deeply and then launched into an astonishing diatribe against Database Administrators, much of his frustration … Read more
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08 May 2014
08 May 2014

Optimizing Transaction Log Throughput

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As a DBA, it is vital to manage transaction log growth explicitly, rather than let SQL Server auto-growth events "manage" it for you. If you undersize the log, and then let SQL Server auto-grow it in small increments, you'll end up with a very fragmented log. Examples in the article, extracted from SQL Server Transaction Log Management by Tony Davis and Gail Shaw, demonstrate how this can have a significant impact on the performance of any SQL Server operations that need to read the log.… Read more
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25 April 2014
25 April 2014

The Body in the Trunk

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When one considers that the primary purpose of a modern Source Control system is to allow branches and subsequent merges, with all the freedom that allows to development teams, it seems odd to see it suggested that it is best practice to avoid the very features that distinguish a source control system from a Wiki. … Read more
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28 March 2014
28 March 2014

D.R.Y. with SQL Scripts

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Developers strive to write well-tested, reusable code with well-defined interfaces so that when they need to update the functionality, they need do so in one place only. It is the principle of ‘Don’t Repeat Yourself’ (D.R.Y.). However, it is common for developers to be poor at applying D.R.Y. to their own past work. When it … Read more
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14 March 2014
14 March 2014

Build, Buy or Rent?

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In the pioneering years of the PC industry, people mainly created for themselves whatever tools they needed, because there wasn’t much of an option. I’ve lost count of the number of developers who claim to have invented their own text editor. These days, we simply buy the product or editing module that best suits our … Read more
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