Hekaton, the power behind SQL Server 2014’s In-Memory OLTP technology, is intended to make data operations run orders of magnitude faster on SQL Server. This works its magic partly by serving database workloads entirely from main memory, using memory-optimized table structures. It replaces the relational engine’s standard locking model with an optimistic concurrency model based … Read more
PASS Summit 13, Day 1 keynote by Quentin Clarke and we’re hearing about “redefiniing mission critical in the cloud”. With a move to the Windows Azure cloud comes the promise of capacity on demand, automatic HA, backups, patching and so on, as well as passing responsibility to MS for managing hardware, upgrades and so on. … Read more
I’m at the PASS Summit in Charlotte for the Day 1 keynote by Quentin Clarke, Corporate VP of the data platform group at Microsoft. He’s talking about how SQL Server 2014 is “pushing boundaries” and first up is SQL Server 2014’s In-Memory OLTP technology (former codename “hekaton”) It is a feature that provokes a lot … Read more
I recently finished editing a book called Tribal SQL, and it was a fantastic experience. It’s a community-sourced book written by first-timers. Fifteen previously unpublished authors contributed one chapter each, with the seemingly simple remit to write about “what makes them passionate about working with SQL Server, something that all SQL Server DBAs and developers … Read more
The recent articles 10 Common Mistakes Java Developers make when Writing SQL and the follow-up, Ten More Mistakes… highlight some common crimes against SQL and offer sound advice. These mistakes aren’t restricted to Java programmers or Oracle. .NET programmers make them with SQL Server (see, for example, Plamen Ratchev’s Ten Common SQL Programming Mistakes from … Read more
A recent study, High Costs and Negative Value of Pair Programming, by Capers Jones, pulls no punches in its assessment of the costs-to- benefits ratio of pair programming, two programmers working together, at a single computer, rather than separately. He implies that pair programming is a method rushed into production on a wave of enthusiasm … Read more
All great developers write reusable code, don’t they? Well, maybe, but as with all statements regarding what “great” developers do or don’t do, it’s probably an over-simplification. A novice programmer, in particular, will encounter in the literature a general assumption of the importance of code reusability. They spend time worrying about DRY (don’t repeat yourself), … Read more
One bad practice guaranteed to cause dismay amongst your colleagues is passing on technical debt without full disclosure. There could only be two reasons for this. Either the developer or DBA didn’t know the difference between good and bad practices, or concealed the debt. Neither reflects well on their professional competence. Technical debt, or code … Read more
There’s some fuss around the additional security risks of moving an existing service within a corporate data center, to a cloud-hosted virtual machine, with a shared infrastructure. I appreciate the caution, but I wonder if they aren’t overstated. Sure, there are new risks, intrinsic to the cloud. For example, the so-called Hyper-jack is a security … Read more
Why shouldn’t we enjoy the benefits of distributed version control systems (DVCS) on Windows? I agree that we’ve made a start, now that, at last, we have a measure of integration into TFS and Visual Studio of Git, and with Atlassian porting SourceTree, their Mac client for Git and Mercurial, to Windows. This is fine … Read more
On the final day of a hectic PASS Summit 2012, in Seattle, I caught up with Bill Graziano (@billgraziano), Douglas McDowell (@douglasmcdowell), and Thomas LaRock (@SQLRockstar) and quizzed them on all things PASS; what it means to the SQL Server community, its plans for the future, and what makes the PASS Summit stand out from … Read more
Although it makes a lot of sense for an IT department to use the Cloud where possible instead of using its own IT infrastructure, you can’t just move everything and expect to be left with no task more taxing than twiddling a big dial marked ‘scale’. Whereas the cloud works well with stateless, process-heavy, application … Read more
I’ve been leafing with interest through the book, Pro Data Backup and Recovery, by Steve Nelson. For anyone predisposed to consider backup strategy largely from the perspective of a SQL Server database administrator, there are some revelatory passages, and a few that may cause you to splutter coffee over your keyboard. According to one such … Read more
There was a sharp intake of breath from the audience when Adam Machanic declared the SQL Server optimizer to be essentially “stuck in 1997”. It was during his fascinating “Query Tuning Mastery: Manhandling Parallelism” session at the recent PASS SQL Summit. Paraphrasing somewhat, Adam (blog | @AdamMachanic) offered a convincing argument that the optimizer often … Read more
How does your company gauge the benefit of attending a technical conference? What’s the best change you made as a direct result of attendance? It’s time again for the PASS Summit and I, like most people go with a set of general goals for enhancing technical knowledge; to learn more about PowerShell, to drill into … Read more
So often at the start of the development of database applications, there is a premature rush to the keyboard. Unless, before we get there, we’ve mapped out and agreed the three data models, the Conceptual, the Logical and the Physical, then the inevitable refactoring will dog development work. It pays to get the data models … Read more
Sometimes, on Simple-Talk, it takes a while to spot strange and unexpected patterns of user activity, or small bugs. For example, one morning we spotted that an article’s comment count had leapt to 1485, but that only four were displayed. With some rooting around in Google Analytics, and the endlessly annoying Community Server admin-interface, we … Read more
It is inevitable that anyone who inherits responsibility for an application will experience that feeling of nagging apprehension. Some signs of doom are universal, the same whether it is a legacy code base, a bought-in system, or group of SQL Servers. It starts with the shiftiness of the manager breaking the news, telltale beads of … Read more
Although development teams are inching closer toward their ideal of a fully automated build and deployment strategy for their applications, a stage remains that is obstinately resistant to automation. Database deployment, and the handover to production support is both inevitable and necessary, but it is currently a manual process. This is particularly tricky in larger … Read more
Most developers and DBAs will know what it’s like to be asked to do “a quick tidy up” on a project that, on closer inspection, turns out to be a barely working prototype: as the cynical programmer says, “when you’re told that a project is 90% done, prepare for the next 90%”. It is easy … Read more
