For most of us in IT, there is no "Golden Parachute" or a $10k / month pension waiting for us when we turn 60. All we have to show for...

Most universities offer technical training courses, and there are Microsoft training centers in every metropolitan city. If your employer is a Microsoft partner, then you'll get plenty of invites for...

What's a "cell" ?

It appears that what we're dealing with here is a "Type 2 slowly changing dimension" table. If so, then the purpose is to retain history. There should be something like...

Yep, data mining a billion email accounts must be one hell of a job.

Assigning useful names to unique keys, foreign keys, and check constraints (rather than simply retaining the GUI assigned default) is important, because these things appear in error messages.

I've found that most dilemmas we face in life are of the false variety. Most of us don't have to choose between either accepting our current situation at work or...

Maybe Microsoft is wanting to following the casino business model where free food and drinks (tools and source code) are used to draw crowds who will end up renting rooms...

First, aggressively pushing table and index changes are something that's typically done during the prototyping and development stage. If you're doing this post-production, then that indicates poor planning.
Secondly, many...

Since we build our software on the data, we need to ensure we are properly capture the data in a way doesn't create too much technical debt. There are...

.. The goal is to have a single truth for each datapoint, if we can achieve that then we can make decisions about whether to copy that data somewhere...

What we use is a combination of sql traces, pings, event logs, application APIs, and for some web applications: parsing http responses. All of it duct taped together with PowerShell...

If your organization is like mine and includes TB scale tables, dozens of developers coding SQL, and hundreds of end users, then adding a new index should definitely be something...