It's interesting coming back to this editorial after 4 years.

I moved into a management position some time ago and from my perspective I was left to sink or swim. ...

Absolutely. A well maintained data dictionary is something that an organisation with mature data handling processes is likely to have.

Every trade has practices that craftsmen use and journeymen don't....

@gary posted a comment on SOLID principles and I think it's well worth reading a summary of those principles.

Two principles that I take to heart and apply to data are...

From a security perspective a vendor that is behind the curve with SP support when the SP plugs security weaknesses is a problem vendor.

Smaller vendors have a cost and logistics...

AWS are doing interesting stuff with lambda functions to allow stress testing of your equipment in the AWS cloud.

There are tools like Gatling explicitly to machine gun your infrastructure. ...

OK so it is port 80/443/8443 out to the web service. If a client of SQLServer calls SQLServer then ingress is on 1433 but we have to allow egress...

I'd be curious to know which ports and protocols have to be open in the firewall to allow SQL Server to use web services.

As far as I can tell TCP...

I've been playing around with Oracle Data Integrator, formerly Sunopsis. It is primarily an ELT tool rather than an ETL tool.

To be honest, most of the SSIS packages I've...

https://watirmelon.com/2012/01/31/introducing-the-software-testing-ice-cream-cone/

While I understand David's frustrations in two years since the article was written I don't see...

The ability to remove an individual's records is a legal requirement in the UK. It is intended for data that is inaccurate or false.

We also have the European Court of...

Steve Jones - SSC Editor (4/27/2016)

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Cloud providers know this, but I think they'd like to get you to code better. After all, they want successes and more customers, not just...

I've just submitted the article on RAND(). I'm not sure if it is quite what you had in mind.

Let me know and I will alter it as you see...

I've been using AWS for the past 12 months. The beauty of it is that I have more time using the DB rather than managing it.

I'd be fascinated to...

There are things that today are regarded as antipatterns which were the only reliable way of doing things yesterday.

Some features that are regarded as horrors (cursors and triggers spring to...

Gary Varga (4/25/2016)

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....or more like...

Management accepts that security should have been a priority when the company gets...