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SSIS Basics: Setting Up Your Initial Package

When working with databases, the use of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a skill that often needs to be acquired quickly, from scratch. Up until now, it has been a curiously frustrating searc...

SQL Server Prefetch and Query Performance

Prefetching can make a surprising difference to SQL Server query execution times where there is a high incidence of waiting for disk i/o operations, but the benefits come at a cost. Mostly, the Query ...

SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn

SQL Server AlwaysOn provides a high-availability and Disaster-recovery solution for SQL Server 2012. It makes use of existing SQL Server features, particularly Failover Clustering, and provides new ca...

C# Async: What is it, and how does it work?

the biggest new feature in C# 5 is Async, and its associated Await (contextual) keyword. Anybody who is faced with creating Metro applications for Windows 8 is having to tackle the very different min...

Handling Deadlocks in SQL Server

In this excerpt from his book Troubleshooting SQL Server: A Guide for the Accidental DBA, Jonathan Kehayias provides a guide to identifying the causes, reacting to, and ultimately preventing the dread...

SQL VIEW Basics

SQL Views are essential for the database developer. However, it is common to see them misued, or neglected. Joe Celko tackles an introduction to the subject, but there is something about the topic th...

SQL Scripts Manager and IronPython

As well as running TSQL and PowerShell, the free SQL Scripts Manager tool can also run Python scripts. This allows even more sophisticated scripting possibilities for managing automated database tasks...

Metrics - A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing (or 'Why you're not clever enough to interpret metrics data')

At RedGate Software, I work on a .NET obfuscator called SmartAssembly. Various features of it use a database to......

.NET Memory Management and Finalization

In this excerpt from his new book, Practical Performance Profiling: Improving the Efficiency of .NET Code, Jean-Phillipe Gouigoux discusses the Dispose mechanism and the finalization process in the c...

SQL Server Transaction Log Fragmentation: a Primer

Generally, you will have no need to worry about the number of virtual log files in your transaction log. However, if you use the default settings for 'auto-grow', you can end up with such 'fragmentati...

Peldi Guilizzoni: Geek of the Week

Peldi is one of the most likeable of the new hybrid IT generation; part entrepreneur, part geek. Balsamiq is Peldi's creation, a tool for creating mockups of software. Balsamiq has shown what a good f...

ASP.NET MVC: Resolve or Inject? Thats the Issue

Classes should have dependencies only on abstract, rather then concrete, clesses. To get around this, you can choose between Service Locator and Dependency Injection techniques. ASP.NET MVC uses 'Dep...

AsyncBridge - write async code for .NET 3.5+

Excited about the new async/await feature in C# 5? Can't run your application on .NET 4.5 yet? Well that's......

The TSQL of CSV: Comma-Delimited of Errors

Despite the neglect of the basic ODBC drivers over the years, they still afford a neat way of reading from, and writing to, CSV files; and to be able to do so in SQL as if they were tables is somewha...

No More Disconnected SQL Development in Visual Studio

Some types of development work are much more effectively accomplished if the developer can work directly on SQL Server Databases from Visual Studio, alongside the application code, rather than consta...

Partial Backup and Restore

In this sample chapter from his book SQL Backup and Restore, Shawn McGehee discusses partial backups, how they're used, and how to avoid potential problems when restoring from a partial backup....

Josh Klein: Big in the IT Business

It is hard to categorize Josh Klein. Author, Technologist, Developer, Entrepreneur, polymath? He has participated in several startups, and is a popular speaker at conferences. He describes himself as ...

To Serve Man?

Since the announcement of Windows 8 and its 'Metro' interface, the .NET community has wondered if the skills they've......

MongoDB Basics for .NET by Example

MongoDB is one of the more intriguing 'NoSQL' databases to emerge from 'Cloud' computing. Sometimes, the best way of understanding a rather different technology is to get stuck-in and try it out, so J...

Windows Azure from a Data Perspective

Before creating a data application in Windows Azure, it is important to make choices based on the type of data you have, as well as the security and the business requirements. There are a wide range o...

Bin Packing Problems: The SQL

The 'bin packing' problem isn't just a fascination for computer scientists, but comes up in a whole range of real-world applications. It isn't that easy to come up with a practical, set oriented solu...

A Generic ASP.NET MVC Template

When you start an ASP.NET MVC project, you choose one of a number of project templates or starter kits. The ones that Visual Studio provide are very useful, but you can create your own if you want, an...

Building a Daily Systems Report Email With PowerShell

A combination of PowerShell and HTML can provide the basis of an easily-scanned report on the basic state of a whole group of servers. Sean combined a range of routine health-checks to provide himsel...

Concurrent Affairs

Is the performance boost from writing code that can fully exploit all available cores worth the cost of the additional programming complexity? Right now, with quad-core processors that, at best, can m...

On Writing Unit Tests for C#

Is it realistic to keep to principles of 'Test-First' and 100% coverage for unit tests when in the heat of developing commercial C# applications? Does rigorous unit-testing lead naturally to good desi...

10 Reasons Why Visual Basic is Better Than C#

After having converted a whole lot of training materials based on VB.NET into C#, Andy Wise Owl Brown decided to write a tongue-in-cheek rant whilst he could still remember the pain-points. 'Convert t...

A Community Cure for a String Splitting Headache

A heartwarming tale of dogged perseverance and Community collaboration to solve some SQL Server string-related headaches....

No Significant Fragmentation? Look Closer

If you are relying on using 'best-practice' percentage-based thresholds when you are creating an index maintenance plan for a SQL Server that checks the fragmentation in your pages, you may miss occ...

PowerShell for SharePoint Developers

For some reason, Sharepoint developers haven't taken to PowerShell with the same enthusiasm as the DBAs and SysAdmins. Dave McMohan is a man on a mission to explain that PowerShell can provide plenty ...

Revisiting Hosting Reflector

You can automate .NET Reflector processes, and run .NET Reflector from within a .NET application, from within ASP.NET or even within ASP.NET MVC. What is more you can host a reflector Add-in. This ope...

Glenn Berry: DBA of the Day

Glenn Berry works as a Database Architect at Avalara in Bainbridge Island, Washington. He is a SQL Server MVP, and has a whole collection of Microsoft certifications, including MCITP, MCDBA, MCSE, MCS...

The Road to Professional Database Development: Set-Based Thinking

Under the pseudonym of 'SwePeso', Peter Larsson is famous on SQL forums for the amazing performance he can get from SQL. How does he do it? In the first of a series of articles, Peter explains his sec...

A Complete Guide to Writing Timer Jobs in SharePoint 2010

Sharepoint allows you to run recurring processes in background on a schedule. These are Timer Jobs. It is easy to get confused by the process of writing, scheduling, administering and updating timer ...

Normalisation and 'Anima notitia copia' (Soul of the Database)

Phil, in a guest editorial for Simple-Talk, puzzles over the possibility that a SQL Server System table commits sins against relational theory. Maybe the answer isn't that simple.......

Exploring SSIS Architecture and Execution History Through Scripting

When you are using SSIS, there soon comes a time when you are confronted with having to do a tricky task such as searching for particular connection strings in all your SSIS packages, or checking the ...

A Testing Perspective of Controllers and Orchestrators

The neat separation between processing and rendering in ASP.NET MVC guarantees you an application design that is inherently teastable. It doesn't guarantee that your application will be well-designed ...

Tuning Red Gate: #2 of Many

In the last installment, I used the SQL Monitor tool to get a snapshot view of the current state of the servers at Red Gate that are giving us trouble. That snapshot suggested some areas where I shoul...

Tuning Red Gate: #1 of Many

Everyone runs into performance issues at some point, even Red Gate software. Some of our internal systems were running into some serious bottlenecks. What if I were to, oh, I don't know, use a certain...

Automated Script-generation with Powershell and SMO

In the first of a series of articles on automating the process of building, modifying and copying SQL Server databases, Phil Factor demonstrates how one can generate TSQL scripts for databases, selec...

Geek of the Week: Don Syme

With the arrival of F# 3.0 Microsoft announced a wide range of improvements such as type providers that made F# a viable alternative to their other .NET languages as a general purpose workhorse. So ...

Converting String Data to XML and XML to String Data

We all appreciate that, in general, XML documents or fragments are held in strings as text markup. In SQL Server, XML variables and columns are instead tokenised to allow rapid access to the data with...

What's the Point of Using VARCHAR(n) Anymore?

The arrival of the (MAX) data types in SQL Server 2005 were one of the most popular feature for the database developer. At the time, there was a lot of discussion as to whether this freedom from havi...

How to Document and Configure SQL Server Instance Settings

Occasionally, when you install identical databases on two different SQL Server instances, they will behave in surprisingly different ways. Why? Most likely, it is down to different configuration setti...

ASP.NET performance: is it all about the database?

If you just assume that your application's slowness is the fault of the database, then that is a quick route to a smug DBA if it later turns out youre wrong. Far better to know for sure how much of yo...

Can desktop software be Lean?

We're currently trying to build a service that lets developers silently update their application. We want desktop developers to enjoy all the same advantages as those who code for web. Desktop softwar...

Educational Programming

At last, weve woken up to the worrying fact that there just arent enough good programmers to go around. Instead of aiming to get a generation of students interested in building their own software, edu...

SQL Cop Review

Static code analysis is used a lot by application programmers, but there have been surprisingly few tools for SQL development that perform a function analogous to Resharper, dotTest, or CodeRush. Wou...

Chuck Moore on the Lost Art of Keeping It Simple

Chuck Moore is still the radical thinker of Information Technology, After an astonishing career designing languages (e.g. FORTH), browser-based computers, CAD systems and CPUs, he is now energetical...

Great SQL Server Debates: Buffer Cache Hit Ratio

One of the more popular counters used by DBAs to monitor SQL Server performance, the Buffer Cache Hit Ratio, is useless as a predictor of imminent performance problems. Worse, it can be misleading. Jo...

Managing ItemUpdating and ItemUpdated Events Firing Twice in a SharePoint Item Event Receiver

Developing a Sharepoint application would have all the fun of a video game, if only you had infinite lives. Dangers lurk hidden out there which, if you run into them, can be a blow to your project and...

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