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
Tony Davis The best and worst ways to optimize your code I was chatting to Phil Factor the other day about the slow start-up of some CLR applications. He started telling... 16 April 2008 3 min read
Tony Davis That ain’t a database, it’s a spreadsheet! “That ain’t a database, it’s a spreadsheet!” From the Sayings of Phil Factor There is a world of difference between... 01 April 2008 3 min read
Tony Davis How should you layout code? It is strange to see the heat generated over arguments about how code should be formatted. With Visual Studio, of... 27 February 2008 4 min read
Tony Davis SQL Server Diagnostics SQL Server diagnostics are a mess. To monitor the well-being of a server, you need to be able to inspect... 12 February 2008 3 min read
Tony Davis TSQL and the Tower of Babel It is always a bit of a strain to program in several languages at once. A simple task like writing... 08 January 2008 3 min read
Tony Davis LINQ and vNext The history of IT is littered with the corpses of software companies that assumed that a solution that worked well... 15 November 2007 3 min read
Tony Davis What are the most innovative .NET tools? We all have our favourite websites. Not the ones we read as part of our job, but the ones we... 31 October 2007 2 min read
Tony Davis Registering for PASS: the deadly game MONDAY, 17 September 2007 On a slightly overcast Denver Monday morning, I strolled into the Colorado Convention Centre, intent on... 18 September 2007 5 min read
Tony Davis Competition: The Great Advances in SQL Server The real advances in IT are seldom the ones that are heralded by great noise or media hype. So many... 30 May 2007 1 min read
Tony Davis PASS 2006: Still giving power to Microsoft people Well, no-one can accuse Microsoft of giving out mixed messages. The framework for Steve Ballmer’s keynote this morning was exactly... 16 November 2006 4 min read
Tony Davis Simple Talk at SQL PASS I just wanted to provide everyone with a “heads-up” on Simple-Talk’s plans for SQL PASS in Seattle. If you’re at... 06 November 2006 3 min read
