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!

---

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...

I'd like to add something with regard to open source software.

1. community editions may be free and will get you started but once you get beyond a certain point...

As Jeff says, it depends on the scale.

But if you are talking about a small business startup I'd say use AWS and one of the RDS options as a starting...

That's outsourced to the VAR in the form of...

Look at Amazon instances. High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large DB = 68GB RAM!

It really depends on what your use case is.

Heavy reads and a large database? You are...