Encrypt your data backups.

Store the certificates used to encrypt your backups somewhere else but equally secure.

Limit access to both the certificates and the backups to a tightly and formally designed...

It's a harsh fact of life and a quick look down the list of fixes in the older versions of SQL Server reveal some quite nasty bugs.

There is inherrent complexity...

There's big by design and big by lack of design.

Big doesn't necessarily mean complex or difficult it really does depend on your use case. For example, the Microsoft Fastrack...

@charles, exactly so.

One of the implementations of Soundex stored the soundex value of a holiday destinations in an indexed field.

When the customer entered a location the system would...

The hardest part of TDD for me was the change in mind set I needed to make. Couple that to the difference between app development and db development and it...

Don't put Soundex inside the difference function as Soundex comparison is implicit in the function.

select Difference(Soundex('Brighton'),Soundex('Bob')) -- Returns 4

select Difference('Brighton','Bob') --Returns 1

Take a look at http://ntz-develop.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/phonetic-algorithms.html

The Rolls Royce solution is Metaphone3 which I believe is in the latest Apache SOLR.

I had planned a followup article based on the link above. ...

Oh bugger, you can tell I don't do much .Net work!

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This...

Continuous integration is a no-brainer. JFDI.

Continuous deployment makes me nervous from a DBA perspective.

If a deployment means a change to a big table and replication is involved then it...

First, what the <insert your own expression here>?

My expression would be "Kalen Delaney".

Ada Lovelace - possibly the first ever computer programmer.

Grace Hopper "the mother of Cobol"

Frances Allen - Won a...

I saw a program about Bill Gates and comments made by (I think) an IBM exec was that he was a better engineer than the engineers in the room, he...

Don't forget ORM tools. Some of the complexity of what needs to be done either means complexity is pushed into the application or implemented using triggers.

I'm experimenting with an old fashioned technique of dealing with strings using SQL CLR to see if it still has benefit.

I'm also trying to blend in test driven development.

I read about Simonyi and why he prefixed stuff and Hungarian notation is a misinterpretation of his work.

The prefix was to denote purpose but has been misinterpretted as denoting type.

I've...

From an application point of view it doesn't matter whether the underlying object is a table or view.

From a DBA point of view I want the freedom to refactor without...