I read a very interesting post on Kimberly Tripp's blog which was about indexing, but she had a very interesting set of requirements for good indexing that I think apply to everything when designing, tuning, backing up, etc., any database. What strikes me the most are 1) and 2) - how can you tune any sort of system if you don't really know ...

I decided to interview Stéphane Faroult, the author of The Art of SQL because it is one of my favorite SQL books. Stéphane told me he has a new book coming out soon, the name of this book is Refactoring SQL Applications and the majority of this interview is focused on that book.   How advanced do you have to be to take advantage of ...

Since I am doing scrum and other agile methodologies myself I decided to interview the authority on agile in the database world. Scott W. Ambler is the Practice Leader Agile Development for IBM Rational You can find more about Scott here: http://www.ibm.com/software/rational/bios/ambler.html   How advanced do you have to be to take ...

So I have been doing Scrum for a while now, I came across this video and thought it was hilarious. When you do Scrum you develop by using sprints, a sprint is usually between 2 and 4 weeks and at the end of the sprint you should have something working that you can show to the client/business unit Watch the video  (can't embed YouTube ...

Microsoft announces the release of Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools! From the website: Team Foundation Server Power Tools includes the following tools: Team Foundation Power Tool command-line tool (TFPT.EXE) Build Notification Process Template Editor Custom Check-In Policy Pack Team Foundation Server ...

I’ve spent the last 6 months on a contract designing and developing a high transaction database – a couple orders of magnitude higher than the average OLTP SQL Server database. The SLA specified a hard transaction duration and the primary fetch feature required some complex business logic. That level of concurrency drives out a few lessons. Some ...

I'd like to thank the people that attended my sessions at the 2007 PASS Summit in Denver this week! I had a blast and hope you all did as well. The code will be available from the PASS website and on a DVD. For those in my sessions, I promised I would post the code here for my custom Counts test condition for Team Edition for Database ...

I am honored and so excited to be presenting a couple sessions at the PASS Summit in Denver next month! One presentation is entitled Integrate Your SSIS Development. The focus is on SSIS development and testing. I touch on continuous integration and test-first development - using Team Foundation Server for the CI and Team ...

Who said you can’t gamble at work and what is Scrum anyway? Scrum is an agile process for developing software. With Scrum, projects progress via a series of iterations called sprints. A sprint can be 2 weeks, 3 weeks or a month. The sprint is a deliverable, after the completion of the sprint you are supposed to have delivered working piece of ...

Introduction  I was recently reminded that iteration matures software. The History of Andy, Part 1  Like many DBAs, I was a software developer in another life. I built web applications - working my way up from HTML through DHTML and finally to ASP - and could regale (and bore) you young whipper-snappers with war-stories of how things ...