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IT Aphorisms for Developers

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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

Who was that masked man anyway?

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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

Morphing the Monolith

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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

Working From Home

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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

To Fly, To Serve, To Fry Your Servers

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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

WannaCry Over Spilled Data

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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 Need for Database DevTest

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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

Python in SQL Server

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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

The Oxford Comma and Me

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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

Avoiding the Slide From DevOps to DevOops

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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

Glasnost in IT: Discarding the Old Certainties

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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

Old is the New New: SQL Server 2016 Learns Ancient Auditing Tricks

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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

The Harsh Reality Behind Big Data Misuse

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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

Metaprogramming

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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

Tying Down the Source Code

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Database source code analysis can flush out weakly-authenticated database users, over-privileged users and roles, or stored procedure code that concatenates a parameter directly into the dynamic SQL string that is to be executed, and so is vulnerable SQL injection. This is great for the development team, but it is also wonderful for the hacker. Getting … Read more

Bridging the DevOps Divide

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What’s the main obstacle to implementing a DevOps approach in your organization? In a recent “State of DevOps” survey conducted by Redgate, the second most popular answer to this question, after “lack of skills”, was “lack of alignment between development and operations teams“. Hmm, so you can’t do DevOps until you have a DevOps culture. … Read more

The Dangers of TechnoMarketingBabble

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Everyone’s encouraged to be a content producer these days. It’s not marketing, it’s content! Sometimes the tell-tale signs are obvious. The author feels obliged to lapse into unrestrained hyperbole in the first paragraph, proclaiming unprecedented greatness for some unproven new feature or technology that represents a “total revolution” in the way you tackle a certain … Read more

Virtue in the Virtual

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Are we now seeing just a frisson of excitement amongst database professionals at the potential of virtualization, and containerization technologies? I read with interest Andrew Pruski’s recent post on SQL Server and containers. Wow, I thought: so I can now run a Docker SQL Server Express in a Hyper-V Container on Windows Server 2016! Then … Read more

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