William Brewer Database Deployment Cribsheet As part of our long-running Cribsheet series, we asked William to write a guide to deployment that described in general... 29 October 2012 14 min read
Seth Delconte Manipulating XML Data in SQL Server When the average database developer is obliged to manipulate XML, either shredding it into relational format, or creating it from... 23 October 2012 14 min read
Feodor Georgiev Designing Databases for Rapid Resilience As the volume of data increases, DBAs need to plan more actively for rapid restores in the event of failure.... 15 October 2012 12 min read
Louis Davidson Tim Ford Tune Your Indexing Strategy with SQL Server DMVs SQL Server Indexes need to be effective. It is wrong to have too few or too many. The ones you... 11 October 2012 42 min read
Michael Sorens Database Source Control Basics: Getting Started It makes a lot of sense to do it, but how do you get started? Whatever you use to build... 09 October 2012 17 min read
Joe Celko Matrix Math in SQL Relational Databases have tables as data structures, not arrays. This makes it tricky and slow to do matrix operations, but... 17 September 2012 10 min read
Phil Factor Registered Servers and Central Management Server Stores SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) has many features that make it particularly convenient for the database developer and DBA. Registered... 28 August 2012 14 min read
Dave Ballantyne Cleaning Up SQL Server Deployment Scripts Although, generally speaking, source control is the truth, a database doesn't quite conform to the ideal because the target schema... 02 August 2012 22 min read
Richard Morris Database Continuous Integration with Bamboo We were so interested in Atlassian's Bamboo, and it's role in Continuous Integration, that we wanted to find out more,... 26 July 2012 15 min read
Phil Factor PowerShell SMO: Just Writing Things Once Sometimes, you can tire of writing the same PowerShell code once again. After this happened to Phil whilst keying in... 19 July 2012 26 min read
Warwick Rudd Encrypting Your SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Databases It is likely that you'll want to add a database with TDS Encryption to your AlwaysOn Availability Group. If you... 04 July 2012 8 min read
Phil Factor Handling Constraint Violations and Errors in SQL Server The database developer can, of course, throw all errors back to the application developer to deal with, but this is... 29 June 2012 27 min read
Annette Allen SSIS Basics: Adding Data Flow to Your Package Annette continues her popular series for SSIS beginners by showing how a data flow task can be used in a... 12 June 2012 16 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Developing Low-Maintenance Databases Alex's team of developers are geared to doing rapid development of database applications in a busy corporate setting, yet take... 12 June 2012 21 min read
Peter Larsson The Road to Professional Database Development: Database Normalization Not only is the process of normalisation valuable for increasing data quality and simplifying the process of modifying data, but... 07 June 2012 27 min read
Annette Allen SSIS Basics: Setting Up Your Initial Package When working with databases, the use of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a skill that often needs to be... 21 May 2012 19 min read
Joe Celko SQL VIEW Basics SQL Views are essential for the database developer. However, it is common to see them misused, or neglected. Joe Celko... 10 May 2012 19 min read
Timothy Wiseman SQL Scripts Manager and IronPython As well as running TSQL and PowerShell, the free SQL Scripts Manager tool can also run Python scripts. This allows... 04 May 2012 10 min read
Bud Aaron How to set up a database-driven Azure site So how easy is it to set up a database-driven application on Azure, using the tools that one is familar... 26 April 2012 12 min read
Richard Morris No More Disconnected SQL Development in Visual Studio Some types of development work are much more effectively accomplished if the developer can work directly on SQL Server Databases... 12 April 2012 7 min read