Is a Primary Key an index?

Not Good Enough For Government Work

The complexity of financial trading systems is too much for an amateur approach, as the losses of various Bitcoin exchanges show.

Is It Time To Clear Out Those Quirky Functions?

Phil Factor ponders a cull of some of SQL Server's worst-behaving functions.

The myth of the ‘shared development model’

Phil Factor fluffs the feathers of the shared sandbox model of development.

Application Developers don’t own their data

As a data guy, I always smile when application developers refer to ‘their’ data. If only it were that simple.

Less and Less Visual

Phil Factor ponders the preponderance of text in current database tools, and asks what happened to our glorious graphical future?

Same tune, different song

It's not new and I'm already doing it. Phil Factor, a.k.a. Methuselah, on Agile, DevOps and Continuous Delivery.

Anything Remotely Useful

Phi Factor on how to combine PowerShell Remoting with slick Windows tools such as SQLPSX, Boxstarter and Chocolatey, to automate the development process right through to delivery.

Should your Source Control System understand your code?

Phil Factor ponders why improvements to source control and versioning so often lag behind the pace of progress in development as a whole.

No reason to abandon SQL

The early signs are that we can now run a SQL-based relational database with distributed execution plans over commodity hardware, leaving just the task of splicing together of the result to the engine itself, then why can’t Microsoft or Oracle do it?