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
Tony Davis The myth of over-normalization I’ve always been suspicious of denormalizing an OLTP database. Denormalisation is a strange activity that is supposed to take place... 21 July 2008 3 min read
Tony Davis VB.NET: The Ugly Duckling One of the greatest pleasures of programming in C# is that wonderful, giddy, feeling of superiority one has over VB.NET... 08 July 2008 3 min read
Tony Davis SQL Server Tumbleweed Awards Several parts of SQL Server look as though they were started and then suddenly abandoned. The classic example is the... 24 June 2008 3 min read
Tony Davis CLR, beer and turkey It is strange that two important programming techniques in a SQL Server Database can’t be done in TSQL. The first... 06 June 2008 2 min read
Tony Davis The Object-oriented Orthodoxy and the DBA Server Management Objects (SMO) is a very impressive product. SMO (and its previous incarnation, SQL-DMO) is essentially an object-oriented interface... 27 May 2008 2 min read
Tony Davis The DBA Daily Checklist The average DBA has to perform many routine checks on his or her servers. There will be daily checks, weekly... 13 May 2008 2 min read
Tony Davis Bad Database Security The Daily WTF recently reported that the Sexual and Violent Offender Registry of Oklahoma had to shut down its website... 29 April 2008 2 min read
