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
Do you suffer from Index Anxiety? Do you lie awake, worrying about whether you are neglecting to defrag your indexes? We’ve all heard the chestnuts: rebuild all indexes that are over 30% fragmented; reorganize those that are between 10-30% fragmented; don’t bother at all for small indexes. If you have the database equivalent of an … Read more
How many DBAs, I wonder, really know how to go about detecting potential rootkits in their SQL Servers? To install a simple database rootkit is an easier task than you might imagine, and once it’s there it can be very difficult to uncover, as it goes about capturing passwords, stealing data, tampering with user accounts, … Read more
What is wrong with benchmarking software? Not much, you’d have thought. A while back, Laila Lotfi wrote an editorial on the need for a standard benchmark for Object-Relational mappers, such as Entity Framework and nHibernate. By how much do they really slow down database applications? When the developers over at x-tensive.com, creators of the DataObjects.Net … Read more
The relational data model is 40 years old this month, and SQL is not much younger. By any standards, it is a mature, well-documented and well-understood language. So why do we still find SQL code in production that lacks resilience, is so vulnerable to breakage due to unexpected usage patterns, small changes in schema design, … Read more
For the older generation of SQL developers, discouraging the use of views is tantamount to accusing a respectable aging dowager of immorality. No way! They’ve always been such benign and conventional database objects. Views are virtual tables, constructed from base tables and other views. They behave just like tables, and are a very simple means … Read more
It was one of those wonderful moments when a task that was, a moment ago, frustrating and nigh-impossible, suddenly became less daunting. I’d been wrestling with PowerShell. We were checking and editing a PowerShell article for Simple Talk and I’d started the ritual of testing out the code and making sure that all the instructions … Read more
There are many good reasons for building your data integrity logic into constraints. When such business rules become part of your DDL, they can never be circumvented. Any change to a rule can be enforced by a single update to a constraint in the database. It is a simple and safe architecture for managing your … Read more
When Database Mirroring was introduced in SQL Server 2005, it seemed reasonable to assume that log shipping would gradually go out of fashion. Mirroring is a way of introducing high-availability to SQL Server by allowing the secondary server to become the main server instantly, in a way that is invisible to the applications using the … Read more
It has been obvious for a while that PowerShell 2 was going to be strongly supported as the natural scripting language for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. It comes with interesting new features, such as the ability to execute scripts on remote systems and write native “ScriptCmdlets”. What’s more it now has a … Read more
Recently, a local builder handed me an estimate for some construction work on my home. Once my eyes had stopped watering, he calmly explained to me that I wasn’t paying him for what he could do, so much as what he knew. He’d been in the trade for 30 years. “That” he declared, pointing at … Read more
“Maintainable code” does not mean the same thing to a DBA as it does to a developer. Production Support staff will want something altogether different from either. These differing perspectives on maintainability have always been a cause of immense grief to IT projects. To a developer, maintainable code simply means “code that is easy to … Read more
When the market is slack, nothing succeeds better at tightening it up than promoting serial group-panic within the community. As an example of this, a wave of multi-core panic spread across the Internet about 18 months ago. IT organizations, it was said, urgently had to improve application performance by an order of magnitude in order … Read more
Programmers often have an old-fashioned view of their trade. They enter the profession imagining that they will spend most of their time puzzling over complex algorithms, developing dazzlingly creative and compelling applications, writing operating systems in their spare time and secretly working on their own computer language. In fact, of course, most programmers’ lives consist … Read more
Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) are an incredibly valuable addition to the DBA’s troubleshooting armory, laying bare previously unavailable information regarding the under-the-covers activity of your database sessions. Why, then, aren’t all DBAs using them? Why do even those that do use them speak wistfully about “good old sysprocesses”? It’s because DMVs are so complex that … Read more
Over recent years, Agile development and Scrum have been championed by some developers, and various consulting firms, with a quasi-religious fervour. Initially, I was sceptical but Scrum has taken hold among the Red Gate development and testing teams and, as I started to witness their “daily scrum downs”, I was moved to act. Why should … Read more
The art of developing an application, or maintaining a database server, really consists of finding ways of postponing or avoiding programming. As Phil Factor points out, most good DBAs and developers are marked out by a propensity for “bone-headed stubbornness and practice beyond the patience of an ordinary mortal“. It’s only when this attitude blinds … Read more
This is the first full day of the PASS 2008 conference in the wonderful city of Seattle. After a great pre-con with Bob Beauchemin, a lively SQLServerCentral party and a severe attack of jet lag, I emerged bleary-eyed for the Wednesday morning Keynote address Usually I like to listen, digest and then blog, but through … Read more
The SQLServerCentral technical forums have matured and evolved over the course of many years. They were initially stoked by the sweat and toil of a small number of experienced DBAs, including Steve Jones, who were willing to dedicate a substantial amount of their day to answering questions. Slowly, the community grew as more people took … Read more
I’m happy to see features and services of SQL Server deprecated by Microsoft if it is for a good reason. Good reasons include conformance with SQL Standards or rejection by the community of users; I consider Microsoft’s commercial convenience to be a bad reason. I suspect that everything possible has been said about Microsoft dropping … Read more
