November 2009 - Posts

• Getting Less Stupid about HTML Code Formatting

  This is probably old news to many people, but sometimes I'm a slow learner. So far, getting neat, color-coded code from Management Studio or Visual Studio into passable Blog-ready HTML has ... well ... mostly made me go, " Aaarrrrrggghh grrrr @*%$^#&! Read More... Posted Tuesday, November 24, 2009 12:04 AM by merrillaldrich | 10 Comments

• Choices in physical storage design – EAV Case Study

  Partitioning for Fun and Profit Over the past year or so I’ve been playing with a toy SQL monitoring application, just to sharpen my dev skills a bit. Part of the app is a SQL database to store historical performance data, in order to do trending. Fooling Read More... Posted Monday, November 23, 2009 5:30 PM by merrillaldrich | 0 Comments Filed under: performance, Storage Design

• Wrinkly Entropy

  So, found this incredible freeware program on Codeplex with a really simple UI to handle performance optimization for SQL Server: I was gonna post the link here but I lost it, and now the site seems to have been taken down... OK, I am obviously lying. Read More... Posted Friday, November 20, 2009 4:44 PM by merrillaldrich | 2 Comments Filed under: performance, theory

• Trick Question -- Part Quattro

  Spoiler: TPH is an evil trap In the last installment I pleaded for the equal treatment of the database schema and object model when implementing an application with a database, on the grounds that the failure of either means the failure of the whole system. Read More... Posted Tuesday, November 17, 2009 10:49 PM by merrillaldrich | 8 Comments Filed under: performance, ORM

• Trick Question -- Part Trois

  This is the third part of a series ( Part 1 , Part 2 ) thinking out loud about the decision making around data access for applications. Once you've considered how tightly bound your application code can safely be to tables, I would like to put two related Read More... Posted Monday, November 16, 2009 1:41 PM by merrillaldrich | 2 Comments Filed under: performance, security, ORM

• Made It

  Mercy, I think I made it. Today was the post-con for the PASS Summit, and I was in a great session hosted by Louis Davidson and Paul Nielsen. I say "hosted" because it was really more a guided, interactive discussion than a lecture, which is great for Read More... Posted Friday, November 06, 2009 10:26 PM by merrillaldrich | 0 Comments Filed under: pass, Dukes of Hazzard

• Must survive ... one more ... day of PASS summit

  OK kids, I am tired. Spanked. Tapped. Fried. So much pure, I.V. delivered Awesome(R) in one week, and I am getting too old to absorb it all. Again all the Uber-Bloggers (you know who you are) have reported the play-by-play from the Summit, but still I Read More... Posted Thursday, November 05, 2009 10:23 PM by merrillaldrich | 0 Comments Filed under: pass

• More PASS Summit Awesomeness

  The summmit is rolling into it's last day (post-conference sessions aside). I got to see some amazing stuff yesterday. Hillarity at the Quest breakfast -- picture five DBAs, in a clown car -- but great content interleaved with the jokes. The MVP Deep Read More... Posted Thursday, November 05, 2009 10:22 AM by merrillaldrich | 0 Comments

• "Like OMG!" Moments from PASS Summit

  So, the PASS conference is in full swing up here in Seattle, and I'm loving it. Others have already given a comprehensive live-blog play-by-play, so I'll skip that. Can I just say that (OMG!) I have met, already, a heap of SQL Server luminaries: SQLBLOG's Read More... Posted Tuesday, November 03, 2009 9:57 PM by merrillaldrich | 2 Comments Filed under: pass