Michael Sorens Build Your Own Resource Monitor in a Jiffy It's great to be able to monitor a counter or any other changing metric while engaged in development work. You'd... 14 September 2015 18 min read
Gail Shaw How to Confuse the SQL Server Query Optimizer Gail Shaw examines three common forms of generic SQL that can and will confuse the SQL Server Optimizer to the... 09 September 2015 35 min read
Robert Sheldon OpenStack: The Good and Not-So-Good Bits OpenStack holds a great deal of promise as a cloud platform built on open standards, and has support from the... 03 September 2015 15 min read
Robert Sheldon An Introduction to the OpenPOWER Foundation In a bid to challenge Intel's dominance of high performance computing environments, IBM have introduced OpenPOWER, a flexible open-source framework... 03 August 2015 12 min read
Karsten Kempe Building a Customised ALM Platform with TFS and VSO The latest versions of Team Foundation Server are not only sophisticated, but extensible. Continue their course of openness, Microsoft have... 22 May 2015 17 min read
Dennes Torres Optimizing Batch Process in SQL Server SQL Server batch processes are usually run from SQL Agent in background. They can take significant time and resources, especially... 08 May 2015 32 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
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
Casimir Saternos R Basics For exploring data and doing open-ended statistical analysis on it, nothing beats the R language. Over the years, this open-source... 04 March 2015 12 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
Robert Sheldon Application Containers For Cloud Computing Containers promise to make applications more portable and efficient. The technology, originally based on Linux's cgroups, provides a way of... 11 February 2015 12 min read
William Brewer IT Compliance and Software Development What is IT Compliance and is it really necessary for contemporary Agile applications to be constrained by the requirements of... 06 February 2015 14 min read
Robert Sheldon Questions About T-SQL Control-of-Flow Language You Were Too Shy to Ask Surely, we all know how T-SQL Control-of-flow language works? In fact it is surprisingly easy to get caught out. What,... 26 January 2015 29 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
Kathi Kellenberger SQL Server Reporting Services Basics: The Visual Controls The challenge of report development is to present complex data in a simple, visually compelling way. The goal is to... 03 December 2014 17 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
Edward Charbeneau Building a Better NuGet NuGet is the standard package manager for the Microsoft development platform including .NET. It has transformed the ease of getting... 07 October 2014 7 min read
Karsten Kempe Who Broke the Build? Continuous Integration and automatic builds are fantastic tools for software teams, but only if developers take responsibility for their code.... 29 August 2014 15 min read
Kathi Kellenberger SQL Server Reporting Services Basics: Customizing SSRS Reports While the Reporting Wizard and basic report tables will do for prototyping, very soon we'll want to add some finesse... 27 August 2014 23 min read
