One nice thing about having a fairly close design between you object models and your database model can be the time savings for documentation. Yes, I said documentation. I keep hearing that we don’t need class models or database relationship diagrams. Still, I have never worked on a project where diagrams were available and accurate that they weren’t often in […]

I was reading about the latest Linux release 4.12. I was surprised at how much has been added to the core capabilities of the operating system. They estimate over 1 million lines of code. What was even more interesting was how some of that code came to be. Linux is now supporting new high performance hardware increasing the throughput and […]

As I was reviewing the CosmosDB solution from Azure I found some really nice surprises. In typical fashion, Microsoft has not created radical new technology. What they have done is to create a most excellent package of top tier data storage implementations, including their own. CosmosDB allows you to store data in Key Value Pair, Vectors, Documents, Graphs and columnar […]

Today I wanted to give a shout out to the Azure Cosmos DB. This is a unique set of data persistence tools all wrapped under a single system providing solutions resolving a large number of difficult persistence problems faced by most applications. Cosmos DB is an Extension of the Azure Document DB solution, with a lot more capabilities. There are […]

COM applications can communicate with RESTful web services quite handily. I found the easiest implementation was to use the COM dll Microsoft wrote for connecting to remote web sites. I believe it was intended to be used in an ActiveX enabled browser, exposing HTTP requests in a COM friendly manner, and capable of returning different result types. What I found […]

One of the key mistakes we make as software developers is the desire to push technology beyond the intended purpose, because it is easy, or quick to market. A perfect example of that practice may be found in some implementations of an automated ORM tool. Let me explain that statement a little bit. Automated ORM tools make a lot of […]

Alexander Chigrik is a regular contributor to www.sswug.org. He has always caught my attention by sniffing out un-documented features in each release of SQL Server, demonstrating how they may be of use. He has scored once again with his sswug editorial ,S”ome useful undocumented SQL Server 2016 extended stored procedures”. https://sswug.org/alexanderchigrik/sql-server/some-useful-undocumented-sql-server-2016-extended-stored-procedures/ There are a few reasons Microsoft does not publish […]

It’s happened once again. Another application where users don’t know what they want, so they try to use a relational OLTP database like a data warehouse. The first time I ever saw this was a manager who had an Access front end to a SQL Server database, using attached tables. That wasn’t really the bad part. The problems all started […]

I’m wondering about how the database recovery landscape is shaping up these days. There are so many options available, and they differ from one SQL Engine to the next. Regardless of your engine, and the failover capabilities available to you, one thing that seems to be pretty common in just about any implementation is the backup of the database to […]

In procedural programming we tend to think in terms of properties and methods. Sometimes those properties may contain collections of properties, which is the closest we generally get to the concepts of programming in SQL. By contrast, SQL programming begins with sets, the procedural concept of collections. While you can work with sets having only a single record, the language […]