I’m fascinated by the way people learn. I’m told there are several methods people use to understand new information, from reading to watching, from experiencing to exploring. Personally, I use multiple methods of learning when I encounter a new topic, usually starting with reading a bit about the concepts. I quickly want to put those into ...

One of the advantages of using Windows Azure to run your code is that you don’t have to constantly manage upgrades on your platform. While that’s a big advantage indeed, it immediately brings up the question - how do the upgrades happen? Microsoft upgrades the Azure platform in periodic increments, and the components that are affected are ...

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) ...

  The latest SQL Server 2008 R2 systems views map poster is available here: 2008 R2 Poster It’s available in a pdf or xps format so have fun with it.   Andy

There have been a few releases over the last few days for some SQL Server 2008 tools that you may be interested in. The first one is the 2008 R2 Best Practices Analyzer found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlreleaseservices/archive/2010/06/19/sql-server-2008-r2-best-practices-analyzer-is-now-available.aspx And the second one is the 2008 R2 ...

I got a question yesterday in the mail that I thought I would just answer here in a broad context. While I can’t troubleshoot or do performance tuning from a distance, there are some interesting concepts and suggestions this e-mail brings up: “I have recently seen a change from SQL Server from 2005 to 2008 in where it handles CASE statements ...

The way in which SQL Server has treated Time has been a very misunderstood subject for as long as I can remember. The largest part of that was the fact that SQL Server was only accurate to 3.33ms. I would like to point you to an excellent article on this and other details surrounding Datetime in SQL Server by Tibor Karaszi found here:  ...

    I am still amazed at how many of the database applications written today still disregard some basic rules of thumb when it comes to accessing the data. One in particular is the use of COUNT(*) to check to see if there are any rows that match some criteria. The technique of using EXISTS over COUNT(*) has been widely publicized ...