We all understand the value of Unit Testing, but how come so few organisations maintain unit tests for their in-house applications? We can no longer pretend that unit testing is a universal panacea for ensuring less-buggy applications. Instead, we should be prepared to actively justify the use of unit tests, and be more savvy about where in the development cycle the unit test resources should be most effectively used.
2012-02-21
3,133 reads
The majority of companies that suffer a major data loss subsequently go out of business. Wesley David remembers vividly the day when the organisation he worked for found that they couldn't restore their data, and the subsequent struggles that ensued. Shoulda-woulda-coulda.
2012-02-20
4,949 reads
The arrival of the (MAX) data types in SQL Server 2005 were one of the most popular feature for the database developer. At the time, there was a lot of discussion as to whether this freedom from having to specify string length came at a cost. Rob attempts to give a final answer as to any down-side.
2012-02-15
8,459 reads
We asked Buck Woody to come up with his favourite 'Cloud' Howlers. After 'Howler' monkeys, we are faced with Howler letters. Buck dreams of sending Howler letters to the folks who dreamed up the marketing hype around 'cloud' services, who misunderstand services, who don't prepares applications for distributed environments and so on.
2012-02-14
2,677 reads
There are around seventy SQL Server instance settings, and a DBA needs to be aware of the effect that many of them have. Brad McGehee explains them in enough detail to help with most common configuration problems, and suggests some best practices.
2012-02-13
4,300 reads
The relational model was devised long before computer hardware was able to deliver an RDBMS that could deliver a fully normalized database with no performance deficit. Now, with reliable SSDs falling in price, we can reap the benefits, instead of getting distracted by NOSQL with its doubtful compromise of 'eventual consistency'.
2012-02-10
3,356 reads
SQL Server 2008 R2 Integration Services offer a wide range of pre-built components, which deliver generic functionality commonly required when performing extraction, transformation, and loading tasks. While most of them are fairly straightforward to deploy in their basic form, typically there are refinements or caveats that should be taken into account as part of their implementation. This principle becomes quite evident when considering use cases of Sort transformation, which is the subject of this article.
2012-02-09
2,339 reads
As each year goes by the uptime requirement for our databases gets larger and larger, meaning the downtime that we have to do maintenance on our databases is getting smaller and smaller. This tip will look at a feature that was introduced in SQL Server 2005 that allows us to leave our indexes online and accessible while they are being rebuilt.
2012-02-08
4,386 reads
In general XML documents or fragments are held in strings as text markup. In SQL Server, XML variables and columns are instead tokenised to allow rapid access to the data within. This is fine, but can cause some odd problems, such as ' entitization'. What do you do if you need to preserve the formatting? As usual Rob Sheldon comes to our aid.
2012-02-07
4,207 reads
One of the more popular counters used by DBAs to monitor SQL Server performance, the Buffer Cache Hit Ratio, is useless as a predictor of imminent performance problems. Worse, it can be misleading. Jonathan Kehayias demonstrates this convincingly with some simple tests.
2012-02-06
2,967 reads
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