The 2016 Home Lab

Read about building your own home lab environment for technology.

DELETE Operation in SQL Server HEAPs

You should stick to using tables in SQL Server, rather than heaps that have no clustered index, unless you have well-considered reasons to choose heaps. However, there are uses for heaps in special circumstances, and it is useful to know what these uses are, and when you should avoid heaps. Uwe Ricken explains, and demonstrates why you'd be unwise to use heaps rather than tables when the data is liable to change.

How to create a directory of object-level scripts using SQL Compare

It’s often useful to be able to create a directory of object-level scripts from an existing database, for example to put a database into version control, or search through a directory of scripts. In this simple ‘how to’ article, Feodor Georgiev expands on the four most common reasons, and shows how simple it is using SQL Compare.

SQL Server 2016 New Date Objects

SQL Server 2016 introduced three new objects to deal with the greater demand of data; John Miner takes a look at this new functionality.

Byte Me: Development Haze

Stairway to U-SQL Level 10: Table-Valued Functions and UDTs

Table-Valued Functions and User-Defined Types can help you write parameterised U-SQL views in an elegant manner. They also aid code reuse.

Migrating data to Azure SQL Data Warehouse in practice

Rangarajan Srirangam from the Azure Customer Advisory Team shares some tips and techniques to help achieve an efficient data migration to Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

Developer Deployment Frustrations

SQL Server should work to make it easy for developers to work with it, and include versions like Express in their applications.

Error Logging Gone Wild

Many of have applications that log errors to a table. Ever thought about what happens when an application starts to throw a lot of errors? This article looks at the problem and some of the responses you might consider having ready in case it happens to you!

Going Interactive with C#

For some time now, C# programmers have gazed enviously at the interactive capabilities of F#, Python and PowerShell. For rapid prototyping work and interactive debugging, dynamic languages are hard to beat. C# Interactive slipped into view quietly, without razzmatazz, in Visual Studio 2015 Update 1. It's good, it's worth knowing about; and Tom Fischer is intent on convincing you of that.