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
William Sisson Where in the Application Should Data Validation be Done? Whereabouts in the application should the business logic of data-validation checks be made? The advantages of a layered approach to... 04 November 2014 12 min read
Michael Sorens Practical PowerShell Unit-Testing: Getting Started By the time you're using PowerShell to automate an increasing amount of the system administration, database maintenance, or application-lifecycle work,... 03 November 2014 19 min read
Kalen Delaney Hekaton in 1000 Words The SQL Server 2014 In-Memory OLTP engine (a.k.a. Hekaton) is a radical change for relational databases. This article, an exerpt... 22 October 2014 6 min read
Scott Swanberg Exploring Your SQL Server Databases with T-SQL Most DBAs hoard their own favourite T-SQL scripts to help them with their work, often on a USB 'thumbdrive', but... 09 October 2014 40 min read
Michael Sorens Acceptance Testing with FitNesse: Database Fixtures, Project Overview There aren't many frameworks for writing acceptance tests for databases, including SQL Server. FitNesse is an obvious choice since it... 03 October 2014 10 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... 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... 22 September 2014 20 min read
Joshua Feierman The Mindset of the Enterprise DBA: Harnessing the Power of Automation After you have done the necessary groundwork of standardizing and centralizing your database administration processes, you are now in a... 02 September 2014 16 min read
Richard Morris Chris Date and the Relational Model Chris Date is famous for his writings on relational theory. At IBM in the seventies, and afterwards, he was a... 22 August 2014 32 min read
Phil Factor Quickly Investigating What’s in the Tables of SQL Server Databases From SQL Server Management Studio it is difficult to look through the first few rows of a whole lot of... 12 August 2014 27 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... 06 August 2014 17 min read