Robert Sheldon Questions about SQL Server Data Types You were Too Shy to Ask Although SQL Data Types seem to cause a lot of grief for database developers and can be tricky in their... 14 July 2014 41 min read
Dwain Camps Calculating and Verifying Check Digits in T-SQL A lot of numbers that we use everyday such as Bank Card numbers, Identification numbers, and ISBN codes, have check... 11 July 2014 24 min read
Jon Smith Catching Bad Data in Entity Framework Any website that rejects the users' input without giving enough information to correct what they're doing is doomed to be... 11 July 2014 17 min read
Grant Fritchey Why Put Your Database into Source Control? Checking program code into source control is a daily ritual for most developers, but versioning database code is less well-understood.... 08 July 2014 7 min read
Grant Fritchey Rollback and Recovery Troubleshooting; Challenges and Strategies What happens if your database deployment goes awry? Do you restore from a backup or snapshot and lose all the... 26 June 2014 16 min read
Robert Chipperfield Introduction to Continuous Integration Servers So you've got your database under source control, and now you want to start running automatic tests and builds with... 19 June 2014 14 min read
Tony Davis Database Branching and Merging Strategies Source control will allow you to maintain branches in the development of your database, but the subsequent merge isn't pain-free.... 18 June 2014 23 min read
David Poole Experiments with NEO4J: Using a graph database as a SQL Server metadata hub NEO4J, the graph database, can be used to provide answers that are very tricky for relational databases, including providing diagrams... 17 June 2014 18 min read
Jonathan Hickford Using Migration Scripts in Database Deployments A SQL migration script is similar to a SQL build script, except that it changes a database from one version... 17 June 2014 20 min read
Michael Sorens PowerShell One-Liners: Accessing, Handling and Writing Data In the grand finale to Michael Sorens' series of PowerShell one-liners, we come to the handling of data, reading it... 05 June 2014 18 min read
Kalen Delaney Row Versioning Concurrency in SQL Server The optimistic concurrency model assumes that several concurrent transactions can usually complete without interfering with each other, and therefore do... 05 June 2014 44 min read
Robert Sheldon SQL Server Source Control Basics For efficient team-based database development, and reliable and repeatable database deployments, source control is not optional. This book provides just... 01 May 2014 3 min read
Robert Sheldon SQL Server XML Questions You Were Too Shy To Ask Sometimes, XML seems a bewildering convention that offers solutions to problems that the average database user doesn't have. To make... 22 April 2014 26 min read
Phil Factor Searching for Strings in SQL Server Databases Sometimes, you just want to do a search in a SQL Server database as if you were using a search... 15 April 2014 20 min read
Joe Celko Database Normalization Basics The task of Database Normalization doesn't have to be painful, especially if you follow Old Mother Celko's Normalization Heuristics.… 07 April 2014 20 min read
Phil Factor Continuous Delivery and the Database Continuous Delivery is fairly generally understood to be an effective way of tackling the problems of software delivery and deployment... 03 April 2014 38 min read
Hugh Bin-Haad We don’t need Source Control: we’re Database Developers As part of our long-running series of articles where we ask working database developers how database source control improves their... 01 April 2014 7 min read
Buck Woody Data Science Laboratory System – Distributed File Databases Distributed File Databases manage large amounts of unstructured or semi-structured data. They are designed on the principle of splitting up... 21 March 2014 15 min read
Joshua Feierman Applying The Scientific Method to SQL Server Performance Tuning Database administrators tend to rely more on science than intuition, and may therefore seem exasperatingly cautious to other IT people.... 10 March 2014 14 min read
Warwick Rudd AlwaysOn Availability Groups – What Not to do when Adding Databases SQL Server's AlwaysOn Availability Groups provide a very resilient way of providing High-availability for SQL Server databases, but there are... 10 March 2014 10 min read
