Jason Crease Writing Build vNext tasks for Visual Studio Online Hosted TFS, now called Visual Studio Online (VSO), has a new way of writing build processes called Build vNext. Agent... 09 September 2015 9 min read
Frazier Kendrick Stumbling Towards Database Change Management The scale of change in the insurance and financial markets is such that there is little time for the application... 09 September 2015 22 min read
Dwain Camps How to Avoid Conditional JOINs in T-SQL Relational databases go out of their way to execute SQL, however bad the crimes against Codd and relational theory within... 07 September 2015 14 min read
Robert Sheldon Working with SQL Server data in Power BI Desktop What's the best way of providing self-service business intelligence (BI) to data that is held in on-premise SQL Server? Not,... 24 August 2015 24 min read
Edward Elliott Non-Breaking Online Database Deployments For an experienced database developer, the idea of doing non-breaking database deployments while the database is still online holds respect... 21 July 2015 11 min read
Adam Aspin SQLXML Bulk Loader Basics SQLXML isn't exactly new technology, but like the even more venerable BCP, it remains the quickest and most reliable way... 02 June 2015 26 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Reusing T-SQL Code Database programmers are often caught in the paradox of wanting to implement business rules and complex functionality in one place... 28 May 2015 27 min read
Tim Hidalgo Managing Test Data as a Database CI Component – Part 2 Once you're clear about what data the developers and testers need to be able to be effective, you have several... 28 May 2015 10 min read
Mike Fal DevOps and the DBA Michael Fal is a huge advocate of automation and many ways it can improve the lives of developers and DBAs... 08 May 2015 11 min read
Phil Factor Documenting your SQL Server Database One of the shocks that a developer can get when starting to program in T-SQL is that there is no... 06 May 2015 27 min read
Feodor Georgiev Making Data Analytics Simpler: SQL Server and R R and SQL Server are a match made in heaven. You don't need anything special to get started beyond the... 28 April 2015 13 min read
Chris Hurley Catching Performance Issues in Development Refactoring code won't cause performance problems, right? This was the assumption when Chris Hurley and his team went out to... 16 April 2015 7 min read
Grahaeme Ross Understanding Cross-Database Transactions in SQL Server Microsoft 'Always On' technology does not support distributed or cross-database transactions. Why not? Grahaeme Ross shows how to investigate cross-database... 11 April 2015 19 min read
Phil Factor Schema-Based Access Control for SQL Server Databases Access-control within the database is important for the security of data, but it should be simple to implement. It is... 09 April 2015 25 min read
Robert Sheldon How to Get SQL Server Data-Conversion Horribly Wrong One of the most certain ways of going wrong with any relational database is to get data conversion wrong. Implicit... 02 April 2015 34 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Painless Refactoring of SQL Server Database Objects Refactoring a database object can often cause unexpected behavior in the code that accesses that object. In this article, adapted... 26 March 2015 25 min read
Dennes Torres Identifying and Solving Index Scan Problems When you're developing database applications, it pays to check for index scans in the SQL Server query plan cache. Once... 10 March 2015 24 min read
Robert Sheldon How to get Database Design Horribly Wrong Database Design is one of those tasks where you have to carefully get all the major aspects right. If you... 06 March 2015 34 min read
Seb Rose What is Behaviour Driven (Database) Development? Behaviour Driven Development is not always clearly understood, and the term is particularly unfamiliar in database circles. Seb Rose introduces... 05 March 2015 16 min read
Thomas LeBlanc Defusing Database Time Bombs: Avoiding the Need to Refactor Databases Where applications are evolved by gradually molding them to a growing understanding of the business domain, this presents great challenges... 27 February 2015 23 min read