A few years ago, I found myself teaching an in-depth SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) class at a local tech center. I had some great students in the class, who were engaged and excited about the material. During the breaks, they talked about their careers, and how what they learned would help them do their … Read more
Why release SQL Server as a Linux, as well as Windows, application? It baffled many DBAs when it was announced, though most shrugged and decided that it must be part of Microsoft’s long-term wrestling match with Oracle. When Microsoft previewed an early version of the Linux SQL Server on Ubuntu and Red-Hat, with ‘core relational … Read more
So, what’s going on in your databases world this week, young man? I paused, as always, a little unsure of what I was getting myself into. I’d been having these little “technical chats” with Gran ever since her ‘computer incident’, when a blue screen informing her of a “Fatal error: catastrophic failure“, had thrown her … Read more
Having successfully fought several privacy battles, granting people the right to have themselves taken off Google search, and to have their records deleted from databases, it looks as if the European Union may soon want to regulate and license what you can watch on YouTube or other video content sites, and the audio-visual content you … Read more
Imagine that your business is providing a service to individuals, and you charge by the amount of usage. You are trading your service internationally and need to keep a record of who among your customers does what. You then produce invoices and keep accounts. Your customers pay via a third-party service. So far so good. … Read more
Developers enter their trade fizzing with untamed creative energy. They envision spending their days dashing out intricate algorithms that compile first time, developing creative applications that dazzle colleagues and users alike, before leaving the office each evening, with a swagger in their step, to work their new GitHub ‘side project’, which will one day soon … Read more
Whenever you require a visit to the doctor, or hospital, a lot of personal data will likely be recorded, alongside details of your condition, the treatment you required, drugs prescribed and so on. At some point, you might have signed a consent form, one of the clauses of which allowed your data to be analyzed … Read more
There are very few real breakthroughs in IT. Most progress in the industry comes from pure effort and attention to detail. When breakthroughs happen, they are like those famous moments in the construction of Alpine tunnels where two teams, start in separate foreign lands working determinedly for years in opposite directions, apparently digging a bigger … Read more
Microservices can certainly be made to work well for particular types of applications, but is it relevant to the mainstream? Can it replace the traditional architectures of database-driven applications? Microservice architecture is a type of service-oriented architecture that was developed from the concept of Domain-Driven design (DDD) and consists of loosely-coupled services that are network-based. … Read more
The idea that one can do nothing useful as a developer unless you are in an open plan office is rather retro. Although we all get that knowing wink when we announce that we are “Working from Home”, the truth is more complicated, I think. Some people are more productive when they work from home, … Read more
So, the story goes that an Ops engineer walked into a data center with the necessary pass, a cheery wave and a ‘good morning’. Shortly afterwards, he made history. At around 8.30AM, British Airway’s entire communications systems went down at the height of the May holiday, forcing them to cancel flights from the UK’s two … Read more
The WannaCry ransomware attack has highlighted a serious problem. If there is negligence in your IT strategy, you are increasingly risking the functioning of your organisation, and the privacy of your customers. If you are being careless with data you don’t own, and of which you are legally only the custodian, if you are storing … Read more
The first and overriding thought of the experienced developer given any new development task is, or should be, ‘How the heck am I going to test this?’. I wonder, though, how often developers neglect to ask this question. Nowadays, with Visual Studio, the debugging facilities are so good you can muddle along happily for a … Read more
Anyone using R in SQL Server employs the procedure sp_execute_external_script, the first parameter of this being the language to use. The documentation rather obliquely says that “the script must be written in a supported and registered language“. Until recently, the only language was R, but now a second supported language, Python, has appeared. Yes, at … Read more
Many people in IT, even at Redgate where I work, see the job title “Editor” and think I spend most of my time fixing spelling mistakes, adding Oxford Commas, and thwarting an author’s ambitions to end a sentence with a preposition. They are sometimes bemused, therefore, when they learn how long a proper technical edit … Read more
If you roll out DevOps across an organization before it is culturally prepared for it, you will see warning signs that the initiative is failing. These are: Team members complain of unmanageable workloads Requirements, quality management and metrics get neglected; customer complaints increase You promote and reward the ‘firefighters’ rather than the staff who prevent … Read more
Three of Redgate’s tools are now part of the 2017 release of Visual Studio Enterprise (as announced last week), as components of the Data Storage and Processing ‘workload’. Some might be surprised to find third-party tools being included in the Visual Studio installer, but it’s an interesting sign of the times. No longer can any … Read more
The new temporal tables in SQL Server 2016 are interesting, in that they seem a much better way of storing any financial information than conventional relational tables. They have been referred to by some as “SQL Server’s time machine”. They are system-versioned tables that allow SQL Server to maintain the different versions each row, using … Read more
Big Data has its origin in science, but it is now being used commercially to increase the information that organizations have about people. This information can uniquely identify individuals and reveal their likes, habits, propensities and wealth. The power of this information is so great that legislation on its use is having to become more … Read more
Over the history of personal computing, it seems that the best software was written by a team of five or fewer programmers. CP/M, the first PC operating system was built by one guy, Gary Kildall, though he got parts from others such as Gordon Eubanks. MSDOS originated in QDOS, again written by one person, Tim … Read more
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