One of the things that drives me crazy as I'm getting older is that my brain is losing the capacity to differentiate version numbers. As I speak travel around speaking with customers and at conferences, I find my self saying things like ''I can't recall if this problem was fixed in SQL Server 2000 or 2005. But you don't have to worry about that ...

A new term - well, perhaps not that new - has come up and I’m actually very excited about it. The term is Data Scientist, and since it’s new, it’s fairly undefined. I’ll explain what I think it means, and why I’m excited about it. In general, I’ve found the term deals at its most basic with analyzing data. Of course, we all do that, and the term ...

When you're developing new Transact-SQL code or modifying some existing code, do you just launch directly into programming? I know that I did just that, for years. It wasn't until I was trying to performance tune some existing code that I realized I hadn't actually taken caching of data and execution plans into account. So all those modified ...

Data files containing comma separated values, or CSV, are some of the most common data formats used for data representation and storage outside the database.  When it comes to loading CSV data into the database, many options exist, however, few make it as simple as CSVexpress, powered by expressor software.  I recently visited ...

Last week Microsoft announced several new offerings for “Big Data” - and since I’m a stickler for definitions, I wanted to make sure I understood what that really means. What is “Big Data”? What size hard drive is that? After all, my laptop has 1TB of storage - is my laptop “Big Data”? There are actually a few definitions for this term, most ...

The other day I was working with a client on an application they were changing to a hybrid architecture – some data on-premise and other data in SQL Azure and Windows Azure Blob storage. I had them make a couple of corrections - the first was that all communications to SQL Azure need to be encrypted. It’s a simple addition to the ...

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a fan of the word “Cloud”. It’s too marketing-oriented, gimmicky and non-specific. A better definition (in many cases) is “Distributed Computing”. That means that some or all of the computing functions are handled somewhere other than under your specific control. But there is a current use of the word “Cloud” ...

Recently I posted an entry explaining that you can develop in Windows Azure without having to connect to the main service on the Internet, using the Software Development Kit (SDK) which installs two emulators - one for compute and the other for storage. That brought up the question of the same kind of thing for SQL Azure. The short answer is that ...

I was just writing a response to a comment on my ''Sell Yourself!'' presentation (http://sqlblog.com/blogs/michael_coles/archive/2010/12/05/sell-yourself-presentation.aspx#comments), and it started getting a little lengthy so I decided to turn it into a blog post.  The ''Sell Yourself!'' post got a couple of very good comments on the ...

Let's face it, there is a wide variety of skill out there. If you spend any time monitoring StackOverflow, MSDN forums, Ask SQL Server Central or twitter's #sqlhelp hash tag, you'll be very well aware that there are people out there barely managing their database environments - people that some of us wouldn't let within a mile of our own data ...