A question was posed: “If a table is not being used in a relational context, what are the benefits of putting a [clustered] index on the table?” Well, I’d highly recommend reading this article on (1) SQL indexes although it is a bit detailed. The short hand summary is that […]
Database Magic
49 posts
Finally BizTalk 2006 R3 *ahem* BizTalk 2009 has entered public beta. This means you can take an early look at the next generation of BizTalk (and, hopefully a new generation of developer tools!). Even with BizTalk 2006 R2, you are required to run Visual Studio 2005! The project is up […]
This is not part of the ongoing series of articles on SQL Data Services, but rather a call out to a Microsoft White Paper which has been published (a) here – SQL Server White Paper Template. I’d recommend, if you are interested in SQL Data Services, that you take a […]
Here’s some helpful information for those of you out there who are trying to make the call between using SQL Server Compact Edition or SQL Server Express Edition. Compare SQL Server 3.5 Compact and SQL Server Express Edition Features [http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/4/7/A47B7B0E-976D-4F49-B15D-F02ADE638EBE/Compact_Express_Comparison.doc] My short summary asks you to determine if any of these […]
Doing some background research ahead of Sunday’s presentation. Thought I’d share this little nugget of wisdom: There are three ways to create a SQL Server CE database. 1. Through a Connection Wizard via Visual Studio or SQL Server Management Studio,2. Programatically, using .Net (the SqlCeEngine class), or3. using the CREATE […]
Recently we had a pretty fierce debate internally about the best strategy for data access in architectural design. Predictably, I played middle-of-the-field, “it depends”, but one of my co-workers, Omar Besiso was inspired to write this excellent entry. I’m not going to rehash the same viewpoint I shared last week. […]
Notes taken from the SQL Server Summit in Sydney Australia September, 2008. I/O considerations fall into the acronym: GASP$ – Growth, Availability, Size, Performance and $(Price). See http://www.microsoft.com/SQL/AlwaysOn for more on availability/failover. Core I/O requirement is stable media (drives/disks) and write ordering (preserve the correct order of operations). […]
As with all good data schemas, there’s usually some refactoring as time goes by. This project isn’t immune to the shifting sands of time or perfection, and so today’s second instalment features a schema change. Below is a representation of the schema shift. To summarise, separate Actor/Director tables have been […]
Let’s kick off the Mini Project by examining the database schema. The project involves storing and manipulating data related to movies (in my case, DVDs I own). For this project I am going to concentrate on three key relationships: 1. Movies have at least one director2. Movies have one or […]
Well, I’ve been waiting for this release since the February CTP drop was "feature complete". SQL Server 2008 went RTM today and is available to subscription owners on MSDN. This is the latest release in the SQL Server family and encompasses a number of different flavours, from the traditional Developer/Standard/Enterprise […]
If you know anything about storing meaningful data for compact (mobile) applications, you’ve probably looked at SQL Server Compact Edition or SQL Server Mobile Edition (2005) in the past. You also probably disregarded previous versions due to their inherent restrictions or lack of support for very mainstream SQL concepts and […]
We all by now have probably heard about the increase in SQL injection attacks to popular (and unpopular) web sites. A SQL Injection attack is where an external party passes potentially harmful or exploitive data in the form of raw, formatted or encoded T-SQL in a way in which it […]
Well, you walk on to a McDonald’s and order a Big Mac. The chick behind the counter punches in something on the register and then asks "do you want fries with that?". Well, Active Data Objects Entity Framework is my Big Mac, and in that case, fries must be the […]
Well recently I tried to give a live example of a design pattern for optimistic concurrency. It’s been a while (more than 12 months) since I last demonstrated this in practice, so I’ve been a bit rusty. Some time ago, I was working on a project at Microsoft with a member […]
Today I feel obliged to link to the almost unknown utility, SQL Server Migration Assistant for MS Access. This is a fairly helpful tool which can simplify migrating Schema and data between two otherwise fairly incompatible products. What is interesting to watch is how the Assistant migrates queries to views and […]