It's great to be able to monitor a counter or any other changing metric while engaged in development work. You'd think that the two alternatives would be using a third-party tool or hacking a PowerShell script. Well no, because there could be an existing open-source PowerShell module that would do it for you, and with a little customization could give you precisely what you need.… Read more
Gail Shaw examines three common forms of generic SQL that can and will confuse the SQL Server Optimizer to the point that it generates and reuses very inefficient execution plans. Want to 'trick' SQL Server into performing millions of logical reads to return the data, when only are few thousand were really required? Try writing catch-all queries, or using control flow statements to create general-purpose procedures, or switching parameter values within a procedure. Just don't expect the resulting queries and procedures to perform well, or consistently. The ideal solution to the problem of generic T-SQL is not to write it, but failing that Gail demonstrates techniques such as recompiling the query on each execution, using hints, dynamic SQL, or splitting generic procedures into sub-procedures.… Read more
OpenStack holds a great deal of promise as a cloud platform built on open standards, and has support from the major players in cloud services. It has the potential for allowing organisations to set up their own private cloud services that are designed to inter-operate. Is it ready yet for companies that want the convenience of cloud solutions, but with more control, and without the large subscription fees? Robert Sheldon finds out.… Read more
In a bid to challenge Intel's dominance of high performance computing environments, IBM have introduced OpenPOWER, a flexible open-source framework based on their POWER processor architecture. Robert Sheldon looks at the potential of this new platform.… Read more
The latest versions of Team Foundation Server are not only sophisticated, but extensible. Continue their course of openness, Microsoft have opened up TFS, and are making it possible to build custom systems on top of it. Karsten Kempe points out three new features that make it possible to build an ALM system to exactly suit you needs, using TFS as the underlying platform, and demonstrates what's possible with an open source dashboard and work-tracking system.… Read more
SQL Server batch processes are usually run from SQL Agent in background. They can take significant time and resources, especially if they are ETL tasks. Quite often, the responsibility for creating these tasks belongs entirely to the developer. Dennes demonstrates that DBAs can advise and assist with this type of batch job by bringing their expertise to bear on the problem of reducing their impact on the working system to a minimum.… Read more
One of the shocks that a developer can get when starting to program in T-SQL is that there is no simple way of generating documentation for routines, structures and interfaces, in the way that Javadocs or Doxygen provides. To embed the documentation in the source is so obvious and easy that it is a wrench to be without this facility. Phil Factor suggests a solution. … Read more
Access-control within the database is important for the security of data, but it should be simple to implement. It is easy to become overwhelmed by the jargon of principals, securables, owners, schemas, roles, users and permissions, but beneath the apparent complexity, there is a schema-based system that, in combination with database roles and ownership-chaining, provides a relatively simple working solution.… Read more
One of the most certain ways of going wrong with any relational database is to get data conversion wrong. Implicit data conversion is a good feature for the expert but can cause a lot of trouble to the unwary. These boil down to seven ways of failing to get data conversion right. Rob Sheldon explains and gives sage advice on how to avoid the problems… Read more
For exploring data and doing open-ended statistical analysis on it, nothing beats the R language. Over the years, this open-source tool has come to dominate the way we do analysis and visualization; It has attracted a rich and varied collection of third-party libraries that has given it remarkable versatility: But how do you get started? Casimir explains how to get started, and get familiar with the way it works. … Read more
How often do you check your query plans during development to see if they contain any warnings? If you're missing them, it means that you're not getting all those hints about missing indexes, join predicates or statistics. Is the query optimiser trying to tell you about implicit conversions? Dennes shows how to view the warnings in plan cache for a particular database using SQL… Read more
Containers promise to make applications more portable and efficient. The technology, originally based on Linux's cgroups, provides a way of running several applications as modular, platform-agnostic packages in isolation on the same server. Docker's open-source approach to containers has dominated the market, and Microsoft is producing its own equivalent Windows system. What next? Will Containers replace VMS? Robert Sheldon investigates.… Read more
What is IT Compliance and is it really necessary for contemporary Agile applications to be constrained by the requirements of compliance? William Brewer argues that if the objective is rapid delivery of applications, then compliance controls must be understood as early as possible in development.… Read more
Surely, we all know how T-SQL Control-of-flow language works? In fact it is surprisingly easy to get caught out. What, for example, do the BREAK, RETURN and CONTINUE keywords do, precisely, in their various contexts? the answers to this and other questions aren't all entirely obvious, but we're too shy to ask them in public, and risk displaying our ignorance.… Read more
For a number of reasons, it pays to have the up-to-date source of all the databases and servers that you're responsible for in a central archive, in version control, and this is a job that is best automated. If you enlist the help of SQL Compare Pro, you can create a Powershell-based system that can be extended to warn you of changes, roughly when they happened, with a report of exactly what changed and how.… Read more
The challenge of report development is to present complex data in a simple, visually compelling way. The goal is to make it as quick and easy as possible for others in the organization to use that data to make decisions, to see progress towards a business target, or spot and act on worrying trends sooner rather than later. Kathi Kellenberger demonstrates how to start adding visual flair to your SSRS reports, using its impressive set of visual controls, ranging from basic charts to gauges, indicators, sparklines, and maps.… Read more
The Project Deployment Model introduced in SSIS 2012, which was explained in the first part of this series, speeds up the deployment of database projects in which there may be hundreds of SSIS packages per project. Not only that, but deployments can be configured differently for each environments such as test and staging, and there are now ways of monitoring the status and performance of packages and of versioning the SSIS Catalog.… Read more
NuGet is the standard package manager for the Microsoft development platform including .NET. It has transformed the ease of getting and installing the latest version of .NET packages, tools and frameworks. It relies on NuGet package authors to get packages right but there is little documentation for them to go by, and there are a few inevitable problems. Ed Charbeneau offers advice from experience … Read more
Continuous Integration and automatic builds are fantastic tools for software teams, but only if developers take responsibility for their code. Karsten Kempe explains how to use Team Foundation Server to drive better continuous integration, and walks through a simple (open source) tool he built to make nightly builds more transparent, and more valuable.… Read more
While the Reporting Wizard and basic report tables will do for prototyping, very soon we'll want to add some finesse to our reports, and allow our report users to create different views of the same data, dynamically. Kathi Kellenberger shows how to use expressions, functions, grouping, the matrix control, and other features, to add a degree of user control to the reports while maintaining visual clarity.… Read more
