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
Joe Celko The DRI Subject of References A database must be able to maintain and enforce the business rules and relationships in data in order to maintain... 11 February 2015 13 min read
Dennes Torres Checking the Plan Cache Warnings for a SQL Server Database How often do you check your query plans during development to see if they contain any warnings? If you're missing... 11 February 2015 10 min read
Feodor Georgiev Curing Data-Obesity in OLTP Databases OLTP databases work best when data that becomes no longer current is then transferred to a separate database for analysis... 06 February 2015 13 min read
Tim Hidalgo Managing Test Data as a Database CI Component – Part 1 Constructing a test environment for your databases can be a difficult task at the best of times. Once you've actually... 03 February 2015 20 min read
Dennes Torres Centralize Your Database Monitoring Process SQL Server Data Collector, together with Management Data Warehouse, is a fine and useful component for gathering information centrally about... 26 January 2015 17 min read
Phil Factor A Start with Automating Database Configuration Management For a number of reasons, it pays to have the up-to-date source of all the databases and servers that you're... 16 January 2015 24 min read
AWS Robert Sheldon in AWS Amazon’s Aurora: A Distributed SQL Database Alternative For MySQL Applications SQL-based distributed Cloud Relational databases aren't new, but Amazon's Aurora offers an alternative to SQL Azure, and, being MySQL-compatible, provides... 15 January 2015 13 min read
Grant Fritchey Why Developers Need to Understand Execution Plans As a coder, the more you know about the business, the better code you're going to write. The more you... 12 January 2015 30 min read
Dwain Camps Archiving Hierarchical, Deleted Transactions Using XML When you delete a business transaction from the database, there are times when you might want to keep a record... 30 December 2014 18 min read
Jon Smith Using Entity Framework with an Existing Database: User Interface Pre-existing databases can pose some difficulties for software developers using an ORM. To demonstrate ways of circumventing them, Jon Smith... 16 December 2014 24 min read
Robert Sheldon Questions About T-SQL Transaction Isolation Levels You Were Too Shy to Ask Every time you access a relational database to make a query, you have an important decision to make: What is... 04 December 2014 28 min read
Jon Smith Using Entity Framework With an Existing Database: Data Access Pre-existing SQL databases, particularly if complex, can often pose problems for software developers who are creating a new application. The... 01 December 2014 18 min read
Matthew Skelton Continuous Delivery for Databases: Microservices, Team Structures, and Conway’s Law Having described some of the most common database deployability blockers, Matthew Skelton proposes a way to enable database continuous delivery... 19 November 2014 20 min read
Feodor Georgiev SSIS 2012 Projects: Deployment Configurations and Monitoring The Project Deployment Model introduced in SSIS 2012, which was explained in the first part of this series, speeds up... 14 November 2014 7 min read
William Brewer Database Configuration Management for SQL Server It is not just the rapid and painless testing, deployment and update of databases that requires care in the retention... 05 November 2014 16 min read
Robert Sheldon Questions About Using TSQL to Import Excel Data You Were Too Shy to Ask It is easy to import Excel data into database tables via TSQL, using OLEDB, either by the OPENROWSET function or... 05 November 2014 31 min read