What's Your Smoke Test?

A smoke test can be a good way to ensure complex systems are working as expected after maintenance or changes.

Windows Containers and Docker

Windows Server 2016 features support for containers. These are not Linux-based, but containers that run on Windows and run Windows on the inside. These conform to the Open Container Initiative (OCI). They allow you to run applications insulated from the rest of the system, within portable containers that include everything an application needs to be fully functional. As they did with Linux, containers will change the nature of the software supply chain for Windows users.

Beyond prediction with R & SQL Server

Predictive / prescriptive analytics is regarded the highest level of advanced analytics. In this post, we emphasise the importance of exploratory analytics to derive meaningful insight.

Designing for the Public

The way that governments build software and work with data must change if we want to be more efficient.

Why Not Just Create Statistics?

Erik Darling looks at why you should be more interested in up to date statistics, and also why statistics outside of indexes aren’t really the most helpful thing.

Byte Me: Let's Cook

Simple T-SQL Code Comparison With PowerShell

Tim Smith shows how you can use PowerShell to automate a simple comparison of objects such as stored procedures, views, and fucntions.

A Slower Job

As we get further in our career, I wonder how many of us would like a slower job.

SQL Server 2016: built-in JSON Use case scenarios

There's built-in JSON support starting with SQL Server 2016. Does that mean we should all ditch XML and start using JSON? It depends mostly on the target of your data output processing.

Crossing the Site Domain with JavaScript

Browsers try to prevent a range of malicious attacks by preventing content being accessed by a web page from a different domain to the one that the page was fetched from. If you have a legitimate need to do this, it is a bad idea to disable this method of defence: Instead, there are more legitimate and safer ways of performing cross-domain JavaScript calls such as JSONP or Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, as Dino explains.