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 validate data and test program flow. It uses 'mocks' to provide hooks to validate program flow, so you can be more confident that a function is doing things they way you intended.… Read more
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 the dimensions of the browser in pixels. To take it to the next level, you need to know about the device and its capabilities and characteristics. If we are facing ever-more diverse devices that can access the web, is it time to understand how to serve web-pages based on the 'form-factor'?… Read more
'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 providing strong consistency combined with horizontal read scalability, and built-in caching. Are Immutable databases a new idea? Are they different in any way from the mainstream RDBMSs.… Read more
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 are relatively slow and fragile, TDS is still used to connect to databases in the cloud, but you need to use a combination of the new features such as connection pools and idle connection resiliency to make applications faster and more reliable. … Read more
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 use Team Foundation Server to drive better continuous integration, and walks through a simple (open source) tool he built to make nightly builds more transparent, and more valuable.… Read more
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 most common challenges which will bring your database deployments to their knees, and the steps you can take to avoid them.… Read more
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, poor debugging and testing, and its design weaknesses, have now been circumvented by frameworks and libraries. JavaScript is now ubiquitous, but is it now suitable for a central role in corporate applications?… Read more
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. The question is: do the scalability gains come at a cost of slowing individual methods? In this article Jon Smith investigates this issue by conducting a side-by-side evaluation of the standard synchronous methods and the new async methods in real applications.… Read more
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 and importance of the data that is presented to the user, and work out which of the four major aspects of caching should be used. There is always a compromise, but in most cases it is an easy compromise to make considering its effects in a heavily-loaded production system… Read more
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 different ways of validating data before writing it to the database. As well as describing how to harness these validation methods Jon Smith shows how capture these errors to make the feedback to the user less cryptic.… Read more
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 your databases under source control is not only vital for the stability of development and deployment, but it will make your life easier when something does go wrong.… Read more
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. Dino cuts through the mystique to pin down what it is, what it isn't, and how to achieve it.… Read more
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 in a consistent and methodical manner. These procedures leave little room for creativity since they must be done right, and in the right order. For DBAs, standardization involves providing and following checklists, notes and instructions so that the results are predictable, correct and easy to maintain… Read more
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 and practical example to get you started quickly.… Read more
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 by providing its own help and command-line intellisense. We aim to make it a bit easier still by providing a series of collections of general-purpose one-liners to cover most of what you'll need to get useful scripting done.… 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
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 write technical articles for Simple-Talk. He came up with the DBA detective, hard-boiled Joe Dee Beay… 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
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. How many databases can you reasonably add? It depends on the resources available and the workload, but you can come up with a reasonable estimate as Warwick Rudd explains… Read more
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, whereas others like LogDumper, almost never. However, they
all have their uses and several become important as part of script-based automation of tasks. It is definitely worth knowing what is lurking in your tools\binn directory.… Read more
