Tag Archives: Friday Poll

Understanding a Database

Posted on November 30, 2018 by

I ran across a post that asked a good question, one which I want to ask you today: how do you learn about a database? I’ve run into quite a few databases in my career. Some were third party systems, like Dynamics and JD … Continue reading →

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The SQL Twilight Zone

Posted on November 2, 2018 by

Imagine you’ve just returned from holiday and your data professional world is turned upside down. There’s not a single SQL Server left at work, or maybe there’s no job to work with SQL Server. Now, what do you do? I’m … Continue reading →

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Fitting Into RAM

Posted on September 21, 2018 by

RAM has always been a fairly limited resource in most of the computer systems I’ve worked with in my career. Often there is never enough RAM, and I’d always like more, often to speed up the systems. That has somewhat … Continue reading →

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The Oddest Thing

Posted on May 25, 2018 by

My desk is a mess, at least, it’s a mess compared to many people’s workspaces. Not as bad as some, but certainly worse than others. I sometimes care and will clean clear things away, maybe even get rid of some items, but for the most part I … Continue reading →

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Disable or Drop

Posted on January 12, 2018 by

When I started working with SQL Server and Windows, it seemed that the administrative side of many actions was limited. We could add and drop many items, but that was it. Relatively few tools allowed setting limits or disabling them, … Continue reading →

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Singular or Plural

Posted on December 8, 2017 by

There are all sorts of interesting debates that developers will have about programming. One of those I’ve written about in the past is Spaces v Tabs. There’s a lot of discussion about that one, and certainly no share of strong opinions. … Continue reading →

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Physical or Virtual Storage

Posted on October 27, 2017 by

When I started working with SQL Server, every server had what we’d call das-dee, or DASD (Direct Attached Storage Devices). These were hard drives inside the same physical case as the rest of the Windows computer. I’ve added lots of … Continue reading →

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The Control Poll

Posted on September 8, 2017 by

This editorial was originally published on May 17, 2013. It is being re-run as Steve is out of the office. I was reading about version control systems (VCS) recently, brushing up on some skills, and saw this quote in a thread: “There … Continue reading →

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Staging Deployments

Posted on April 7, 2017 by

This editorial was originally published on Nov 30, 2011. It is being republished as Steve is out of the office. Software development can be a complicated dance. Most of us do not work for a software vendor and don’t have … Continue reading →

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The One Metric to Rule Them All

Posted on December 9, 2016 by

When we want to know if our databases are running well, most of us look at metrics for our servers. Usually some combination of CPU, RAM, Disk IO are chosen, though network, user connections, batches and transactions can be a … Continue reading →

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