Tony Davis The SSRS 2008 Minefield One of the big advances in Microsoft’s “2008 platform”, with regard to Reporting Services, was that there would be a... 16 October 2009 3 min read
Tony Davis Index Fragmentation Anxiety: a Doctor Speaks Do you suffer from Index Anxiety? Do you lie awake, worrying about whether you are neglecting to defrag your indexes?... 01 October 2009 3 min read
Tony Davis SQL Server Rootkits: Security Scare or Nightmare? How many DBAs, I wonder, really know how to go about detecting potential rootkits in their SQL Servers? To install... 17 September 2009 3 min read
Tony Davis The ORM Brouhaha What is wrong with benchmarking software? Not much, you’d have thought. A while back, Laila Lotfi wrote an editorial on... 03 September 2009 3 min read
Tony Davis In Defence of Defensive programming The relational data model is 40 years old this month, and SQL is not much younger. By any standards, it... 21 August 2009 3 min read
Tony Davis Database Trampled by Godzilla View For the older generation of SQL developers, discouraging the use of views is tantamount to accusing a respectable aging dowager... 06 August 2009 3 min read
Tony Davis The Horse’s Mouth It was one of those wonderful moments when a task that was, a moment ago, frustrating and nigh-impossible, suddenly became... 23 July 2009 3 min read
Tony Davis Working within Constraints There are many good reasons for building your data integrity logic into constraints. When such business rules become part of... 09 July 2009 3 min read
Tony Davis The Fall and Rise of Log Shipping When Database Mirroring was introduced in SQL Server 2005, it seemed reasonable to assume that log shipping would gradually go... 25 June 2009 3 min read
Tony Davis One Shell to Rule Them All (and in the darkness bind them) It has been obvious for a while that PowerShell 2 was going to be strongly supported as the natural scripting... 14 May 2009 3 min read
Tony Davis Why Most Developers are Rubbish at Estimating Recently, a local builder handed me an estimate for some construction work on my home. Once my eyes had stopped... 28 April 2009 3 min read
Tony Davis What is "maintainable code"? “Maintainable code” does not mean the same thing to a DBA as it does to a developer. Production Support staff... 14 April 2009 3 min read
Tony Davis Multi-core Mania When the market is slack, nothing succeeds better at tightening it up than promoting serial group-panic within the community. As... 31 March 2009 3 min read
Tony Davis The Greasy Pole Programmers often have an old-fashioned view of their trade. They enter the profession imagining that they will spend most of... 04 March 2009 3 min read
Tony Davis In Pursuit of Simplicity Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) are an incredibly valuable addition to the DBA’s troubleshooting armory, laying bare previously unavailable information regarding... 17 February 2009 3 min read
Tony Davis The Publishing Maul Over recent years, Agile development and Scrum have been championed by some developers, and various consulting firms, with a quasi-religious... 03 February 2009 3 min read
Tony Davis Beg, Borrow, Steal before Build The art of developing an application, or maintaining a database server, really consists of finding ways of postponing or avoiding... 26 January 2009 3 min read
Tony Davis PASS 2008 Keynote, Part 1: Wayne Snyder This is the first full day of the PASS 2008 conference in the wonderful city of Seattle. After a great... 19 November 2008 2 min read
Tony Davis Building Technical Communities The SQLServerCentral technical forums have matured and evolved over the course of many years. They were initially stoked by the... 11 November 2008 3 min read
Tony Davis Reasons to Deprecate I’m happy to see features and services of SQL Server deprecated by Microsoft if it is for a good reason.... 24 October 2008 3 min read
