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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02 September 2010
02 September 2010

The VSS Mess

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Microsoft’s Visual SourceSafe (VSS) will soon cease to exist. Mainstream support will end in April 2011, and so users will be forced to make the leap to an alternative: But which one? Visual SourceSafe was bought by Microsoft to fill in a hole in their development IDE. It was originally a DOS command-line tool that … Read more
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20 August 2010
20 August 2010

Oslo at rock bottom

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Back in 2003, Microsoft launched a project that they hoped would “capture people’s ideas, requirements and hopes for software” and turn them into distributed applications. It was variously described as the “Excel” of the database world; a people’s data repository. In short, this project, codenamed Oslo, set out to create a general-purpose software-modelling platform that … Read more
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06 August 2010
06 August 2010

Virtue in the Virtual

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Everyone knows the difference between a live SQL Server database file and a backup file. However, it seems that this distinction is being eroded, gradually, by the third-party tool providers. First, we saw tools that could compare live databases with backups, in order to report the differences in data or structure. Now we are seeing … Read more
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09 June 2010
09 June 2010

DAC pack up all your troubles

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Visual Studio 2010, or perhaps its apparently-forthcoming sister, “SQL Studio“, is being geared up to become the natural way for developers to create databases. Central to this drive is the introduction of ‘data-tier application components’, or DACs. Applications are developed as normal but when it comes to deployment, instead of supplying the DBA with a … Read more
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27 May 2010
27 May 2010

Sweet and Sour Source Control

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Most database developers don’t use Source Control. A recent anonymous poll on SQL Server Central asked its readers “Which Version Control system do you currently use to store you database scripts?” The winner, with almost 30% of the vote was…none: “We don’t use source control for database scripts”. In second place with almost 28% of … Read more
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13 May 2010
13 May 2010

Access Denied

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When Microsoft executives wake up in the night screaming, I suspect they are having a nightmare about their own version of Frankenstein’s monster. Created with the best of intentions, without thinking too hard of the long-term strategy, and having long outlived its usefulness, the monster still lives on, occasionally wreaking vengeance on the innocent. Its … Read more
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29 April 2010
29 April 2010

Need to Know

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Sometimes, I wonder whether writers of documentation, tutorials and articles stop to ask themselves one very important question: Does the reader really need to know this? I recently took on the task of writing a concise series of articles about the transaction log, what is it, how it works and why it’s important. It was … Read more
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19 March 2010
19 March 2010

On Writing Blogs

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Why are so many blogs about IT so difficult to read? Over at SQLServerCentral.com, we do a special subscription-only newsletter called Database Weekly. Every other week, it is my turn to look through all the blogs, news and events that might be of relevance to people working with databases. We provide the title, with the … Read more
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18 February 2010
18 February 2010

Inappropriate Updates?

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A recent Simple-talk article by Kathi Kellenberger dissected the fastest SQL solution, submitted by Peter Larsson as part of Phil Factor’s SQL Speed Phreak challenge, to the classic “running total” problem. In its analysis of the code, the article re-ignited a heated debate regarding the techniques that should, and should not, be deemed acceptable in … Read more
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05 February 2010
05 February 2010

A Plea for Plain English

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The English language has, within a lifetime, emerged as the ubiquitous ‘international language’ of scientific, political and technical communication. On the one hand, learning a single, common language, International English, has made it much easier to participate in and adopt new technologies; on the other hand it must be exasperating to have to use English … Read more
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07 January 2010
07 January 2010

Reckless Drivers

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When I first joined the industry in the late 90’s, Microsoft was in the process of shunting the ODBC driver into the background in favour of OLE-DB and ADO. The ODBC driver was still included in Microsoft’ Windows MDAC framework, but it had gained a rather unfair reputation for obtuse connections strings, unreliability and slow … Read more
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11 December 2009
11 December 2009

Paradoxical T-SQL

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I’ve always taken comfort in the fact that T-SQL belongs to an enlightened age of computer languages in which the operations that were specified were close to real language. When one sees a command called DBCC_CHECKDB, then one could feel pretty confident that it checks your database for any problems. Or so I thought…until I … Read more
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28 October 2009
28 October 2009

SQL Server Sheep Ticks

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The doggedness with which certain SQL Server “myths” cling to the coat of the SQL Server community is really quite astonishing. They are the proverbial “sheep ticks”; very annoying and incredibly difficult to dislodge. And even when you think you’ve managed it, their embedded jaws remain to provoke further irritation. A classic case in point … Read more
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16 October 2009
16 October 2009

The SSRS 2008 Minefield

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One of the big advances in Microsoft’s “2008 platform”, with regard to Reporting Services, was that there would be a single, consistent Report Definition Language (RDL) across all the products. This means that reports developed in Report Builder can be shared with reports developed in BIDS, and vice-versa. While one can immediately appreciate the advantages … Read more
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