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
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 Check Digits in T-SQL: UPC, Luhn, and IBAN Algorithms with Code Calculate and verify check digits in T-SQL for Universal Product Codes (UPC), credit card numbers (Luhn algorithm), and International Bank... 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
Database Administration Jonathan Hickford in Database Administration Database Migration Scripts: When to Write Them and How Database migration scripts handle changes that automated sync tools can't infer - table renames, column splits, data migrations. Learn when... 17 June 2014 21 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
