Michael Sorens Practical PowerShell Unit-Testing: Checking program flow Pester offers a relatively small number of commands to Unit-test PowerShell scripts, but these commands have tremendous capabilities. Pester even gives you the means to... 05 November 2014 16 min read
Dino Esposito Responsive Web Design: Relying on the Form-Factor For visitors to get a good experience from your website irrespective of the device they use, you need to do more than just accommodate to... 07 October 2014 11 min read
Robert Young Ninja Immutable Databases 'Immutable' databases operate under the principle that data or objects should not be modified after they are created. Once again they hold the promise of... 22 September 2014 13 min read
Edward Elliott Improving the Quality of SQL Server Database Connections in the Cloud To access SQL Server from the client, you use TDS protocol over TCP. This is fine over reliable LANs but over the internet these connections... 22 September 2014 20 min read
Karsten Kempe Who Broke the Build? Continuous Integration and automatic builds are fantastic tools for software teams, but only if developers take responsibility for their code. Karsten Kempe explains how to... 29 August 2014 15 min read
Matthew Skelton Common database deployment blockers and Continuous Delivery headaches Deployability is now a first class concern for databases, so why isn't it as easy as it should be? Matthew Skelton explores seven of the... 06 August 2014 17 min read
Konrad Lukasik The JavaScript Landscape in Broad Brushstrokes JavaScript has come a long way from its humble origins as a simple interpreted object-oriented language for browser-side scripting of web pages. It's many inadequacies,... 30 July 2014 11 min read
Jon Smith The .NET 4.5 async/await feature in Promise and Practice The .NET 4.5 async/await feature provides an opportunity for improving the scalability and performance of applications, particularly where tasks are more effectively done in parallel.... 28 July 2014 20 min read
Dino Esposito Caching: the Good, the Bad and the Hype One of the more important aspects of the scalability of an ASP.NET site is caching. To do this effectively, one must understand the relative permanence... 11 July 2014 12 min read
Jon Smith Catching Bad Data in Entity Framework Any website that rejects the users' input without giving enough information to correct what they're doing is doomed to be unpopular. Entity Framework offers three... 11 July 2014 17 min read
Grant Fritchey Why Put Your Database into Source Control? Checking program code into source control is a daily ritual for most developers, but versioning database code is less well-understood. Grant Fritchey argues that getting... 08 July 2014 7 min read
Dino Esposito ASP.NET Scalability: the Good, the Bad and the Hype Scalability remains an exasperatingly vague term, even though there are well-established ways of ensuring that a web-based application reacts well to wide variations in usage.... 25 June 2014 11 min read
Joshua Feierman The Mindset of the Enterprise DBA: Creating and Applying Standards to Our Work Although many professions, such as pilots, surgeons and IT administrators, require judgement and skill, they also require the ability to do many repeated standard procedures... 25 June 2014 12 min read
Robert Sheldon SQL Server Source Control Basics For efficient team-based database development, and reliable and repeatable database deployments, source control is not optional. This book provides just the right combination of theory... 01 May 2014 3 min read
Michael Sorens PowerShell One-Liners: Help, Syntax, Display and Files PowerShell is designed to be used by busy IT professionals who want to get things done, and don't necessarily enjoy programming. PowerShell tackles this paradox... 04 April 2014 16 min read
Hugh Bin-Haad We don’t need Source Control: we’re Database Developers 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... 01 April 2014 7 min read
Grant Fritchey The DBA Detective: Disturbing Developments Originally one of the articles in the first DBA Team series, Grant wonders what Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett would have done if asked to... 31 March 2014 14 min read
Richard Morris Paul Randal: Geek of the Week 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... 10 March 2014 10 min read
Warwick Rudd AlwaysOn Availability Groups – What Not to do when Adding Databases SQL Server's AlwaysOn Availability Groups provide a very resilient way of providing High-availability for SQL Server databases, but there are inevitable limits to their capacity.... 10 March 2014 10 min read
Robert Sheldon Seven SQL Server Under-Used Utilities There are more than ten useful command-line applications that are either associated with, or are distributed with, SQL Server. Some, like BCP are used often,... 25 February 2014 13 min read