We asked several well-known readers of Simple-Talk to write about their all-time top ten favourite articles from
Simple-Talk, and why these articles had particularly appealed to them. First off the blocks is Jonathan Allen, a working DBA who has done so much for the community of SQL Server users in the UK. … Read more
It is a question that almost anybody working in IT occasionally ask themselves. 'How can I best develop my career to make sure my skills and experience remain in demand?' The questions may be spurred by a variety of reasons, including job-insecurity, dissatisfaction, or a wish for career advancement. So what advice would you give? Buck Woody tackles the difficult question with some straight-forward advice..… Read more
UPDATE: Congrats to Conan who won this caption competition with: “Darling, now that you’re working from home, you can just wear pajamas like everyone else.” Thanks to everyone who participated! Finding himself interrupted during work on his laptop, this old-timey gentleman and lady exchange a word. But what was said? That’s what we want to … Read more
When one considers that the primary purpose of a modern Source Control system is to allow branches and subsequent merges, with all the freedom that allows to development teams, it seems odd to see it suggested that it is best practice to avoid the very features that distinguish a source control system from a Wiki. … Read more
As part of our long-running series of articles where we ask working database developers how database source control improves their work within development teams, we made the mistake of asking Hugh Bin-Haad, Database dev and relational theorist.… Read more
Developers strive to write well-tested, reusable code with well-defined interfaces so that when they need to update the functionality, they need do so in one place only. It is the principle of ‘Don’t Repeat Yourself’ (D.R.Y.). However, it is common for developers to be poor at applying D.R.Y. to their own past work. When it … Read more
In the pioneering years of the PC industry, people mainly created for themselves whatever tools they needed, because there wasn’t much of an option. I’ve lost count of the number of developers who claim to have invented their own text editor. These days, we simply buy the product or editing module that best suits our … Read more
Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp, together with their small team of experts at SQLSkills.com, dominate the high-end training and consultancy for SQL Server. They help to maintain this domination by virtue of their popular public speaking, and writing. We sent Richard Morris to find out a bit more about Paul, his views about SQL Server, his lifestyle, ambitions and plans.… Read more
The term ‘DevOps’ has been widely misunderstood because the different teams within any really substantial development project understand the work of the other teams so poorly. There will be several teams, including business analysts, technical architects (maybe), UX specialists, designers, testers, and developers. No development specialists, however, have until recently had the production environment firmly … Read more
In one of his first ever Simple-talk articles, Phil Factor tells the story of a freelance Sybase programmer who created a reporting system using exquisitely complex dynamically compiled stored procedures, and then promptly departed when he failed to secure a doubling of his contract rate. As Phil struggled to make sense of the code, with … Read more
Sometimes, technical jargon is often so readily understandable by the technical community that they forget that it may be interpreted quite differently by the rest of the business. 'Technical Debt' is an example of a metaphor that is considered very differently by others. By failing to adopt a common language, you could be giving a message about your IT project that is quite different to the one you intended.… Read more
Often, one sees the views of those raising reasoned doubts about cloud security dismissed as fogeyish and cloud-phobic. Of course, it’s a persuasive argument that cloud security is actually a non-issue, since under-investment means that the on-premise infrastructure of many organizations is a less secure environment for their applications than the cloud. The ClimateGate evidence, … Read more
Creating and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships with external vendors is one of the pillars of good project management. Dwain Camps goes through what to expect and allow in your client-vendor relationship during the various stages of a given project to ensure its success and secure that all important win-win outcome.… Read more
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
When you work for a small software development (or any services) company, one of the major challenges is to make sure that you expend your limited resources on opportunities that are economically sound. You may be approached by companies that have heard about you and think they might want to do business with you, but do these leads really represent opportunities? How much of your time should be spent finding out? Dwain Camps offers some guidance.… 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
Ruby on Rails, the open-source web application framework, grew out of David Heinemeier Hansson's work on Basecamp at 37Signals. It is now so popular with developers that it has been shipped with Mac OSX since 2007, and has a dedicated Windows following. Rail's focus on software engineering patters and Agile philosophy were so intriguing that we decided that DHH should be Geek of the Week. … Read more
