Most mature development shops use various code diagrams to give a symbolic representation of high-level and database code structures. Standards such as Business Process Model Notation (BPMN), Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERD) and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) are a few I use all the time. In the Distributed Computing (Cloud Computing) ...

Lucy, You Got Some 'Splainin to Do!' Quest Software's latest community initiative, Windows Azure-based Project Lucy, has debuted! Project Lucy is part infrastructure analytics, part social media experiment, and part performance data warehouse. The best things about Project Lucy include: It’s Free - just like our SQLServerPedia ...

I did a lot of writing in 2010. Unfortunately, I didn't do a good job of keeping all of that writing equally distributed throughout all of the channels where I'm active. So here are a few more posts from my blog, put on-line during the months of November and December 2010, that I didn't get posted here on SQLBlog.com: 1. It's Time to ...

I wanted to pass along this great info from Microsoft.  There are literally oodles of free resources for Visual Studio programmers. In their own words... Take Visual Studio for a Test Drive Take this powerful tool and its features for a spin by downloading a full Visual Studio 2010 trial version. Discover how Visual Studio 2010 ...

Good grief, there's a lot of travel in my future. <sigh ... deep breath> It'll be exhausting and it'll be hard to lose so much time with the family. But if I'm able to avoid travel mishaps, it'll be fun.  Meet Me In St. Louis I'll be speaking in St. Louis, MO on Tuesday, September 14th for their mid-day meeting. The details, ...

Database Schemas are just containers – they aren’t users or anything else – think of a sub-directory on the hard drive. In early versions of SQL Server we “hid” schemas, placing all objects under “dbo”, which gave the erroneous perception that Schemas are users. In SQL Server 2005, we “un-hid” or re-introduced schemas within the database. Users ...

Everybody enjoys a little free training now and then. I've got mountains of free training in the works. Some of it is in-person and local while some are in webcast format. Please join me as you're able! Tomorrow - Wednesday! Wed, Feb 10, 2010 12 pm (noon) MST - PASS DBA Virtual Chapter; Top 10 Administration Mistakes on SQL ...