Looking over the developers' shoulders. -ANTS Performance Profiler 4
by Bart Read | 12 May 2008
You can get your hands on a very early, very rough version of ANTS
Performance Profiler 4. It’s not a beta, it’s not beta quality, it really is a just a development build. So if you’re feeling brave you might want to download it and give it a try. We're all really quite excited about this, and we really hope that, despite the warts, you’re going to like it.
Event, sit! Event, staaaay...
by RobertChipperfield | 08 May 2008
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1 comment 
Robert shows how easy it is to be caught out by the way that the CLR Garbage Collector is sometimes too ready to be rid of a COM object when the applicaion is still listening for events from it. So how do you stop it happening? Read on....
SQL Code Layout and Beautification
by William Brewer | 11 May 2008
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William Brewer takes a look at the whole topic of SQL Code layout and beautification, an important aspect to SQL programming style. He concludes that once you are tired of laying SQL out by hand, you had better choose a tool with plenty of knobs to twiddle, because nobody seems to agree on the best way of doing it
.NET Performance Cribsheet
by Robyn Page and Phil Factor | 11 May 2008
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Robyn and Phil tackle the topic of how to make .NET applications perform well. As usual, they try to take a terse, practical approach to the mysteries of JIT, CLR and GC. After giving many performance tips, they come to the conclusion that rules and tips are less useful than rolling up your sleeves and measuring or profiling everything possible, to see what's really happening with your application.
Bad Database Security
by Tony Davis | 29 April 2008
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Tony Davis, on the security loopholes that arise from poor database security.
The Burning Men - The IT drug habit
by Richard Morris | 29 April 2008
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It would seem bizzare that IT staff who depend on their quick wits for their living should ever think it a good idea to fry their brains with recreational drugs. It is therefore worrying to hear that there has been a 34 percent increase in IT employees in the US testing positive for cocaine usage in the workplace. We sent the taciturn Richard Morris to find out more.
SSIS Package Componentization
by David Leibowitz | 29 April 2008
| 10 comments | 
In this article, David Leibowitz describes methods for scalable SQL Server 2005 Integration Services package creation. If you’re no stranger to OOP, then the methods described will fit nicely in your enterprise ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) toolkit.
The Time Bomb
by Phil Factor | 29 April 2008
| 5 comments | 
Phil cheerfully admits to his fair share of accidental IT disasters. His experiences some time ago with the Time Bomb, where his software crashed and threatened civil unreast in a far-away country were, however, deliberate.
What's up with 'using'?
by Bart Read | 28 April 2008
| 3 comments Let me lay my cards on the table right from the start: I don’t like using, and I don’t use it any more (no pun intended). In fact I haven’t for quite some time. In this post I’m going to try to explain why I don’t use it, and why I don’t think you should either.
Weekly Status Report and How DBA Managers Lose Their Edge...
by Rodney | 24 April 2008
In which Rodney goes in pursuit of a mysterious growth in MSDB on one of his many servers, and after an epic struggle to slaughter an 'undead' Service Broker, decides that he is losing his edge.