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A Plea for Plain English

Tony Davis — 05 February 2010

The English language has, within a lifetime, emerged as the ubiquitous 'international language' of scientific, political and technical communication. It must be exasperating to have to use English at international conferences, or on community sites, when your own language has a long tradition of scientific and technical usage.

Finding Stuff in SQL Server Database DDL

Phil Factor — 04 February 2010

You'd have thought that nothing would be easier than using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) for searching through the DDL for both the names and definitions of the structural metadata of your databases, for the occurrence of a particular string of letters. Not so easy, it turns out, though Phil Factor is able to come up with various methods for various purposes.

Peter Norvig: Geek of the Week

Richard Morris — 03 February 2010

It's likely that you are already using the results of Peter Norvig's work every day, if you search the internet with Google. One of the smartest moves that Google ever made was to hire the man who not only was a leading expert in Artificial Intelligence, but was an expert application developer. Now he leads a team of over a hundred researchers to discover better ways of handling issues such as the machine-understanding and machine-translation of language in the quest for semantic search.

Switching rows and columns in SQL

Paul Nielsen — 04 February 2010

When they use SQL Server, one the commoner questions that Ms Access programmers ask is 'Where's the TRANSFORM/PIVOT command? So how do you swap colums and rows in an aggregate table? Do you really need to use a CLR routine for this?

Simple Query tuning with STATISTICS IO and Execution plans

Josef Richberg — 04 February 2010

A great deal can be gleaned from the use of the STATISTICS IO and the execution plan, when you are checking that a query is performing properly. Josef Richberg, the current holder of the 'Exceptional DBA' award, explains how an apparently draconian IT policy turns out to be a useful ways of ensuring that Stored Procedures are carefully checked for performance before they are released

Mission Critical: SQL Server 2008 Performance Tuning Task List

Buck Woody — 04 February 2010

In which Buck Woody imagines how the US military would have tackled DBA checklists for 'mission-critical' databases. And having imagined it, lo, it came to be. The CTL for the DBA with short-back-and-sides.

Writing Efficient SQL: Set-Based Speed Phreakery

Kathi Kellenberger — 04 February 2010

Phil Factor's SQL Speed Phreak challenge is an internet event where coders battle to produce the fastest code to solve a common reporting problem on large data sets. It isn't that easy on the spectators, since the programmers don't score extra points for commenting their code. Mercifully, Kathi is on hand to explain some of the TSQL coding secrets that go to producing blistering performance.

Raw Materials: Performance Acceleration

Larry Gonick — 03 February 2010

Sometimes it's best to keep your secrets to yourself.

How to Create Event Receivers for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Charles Lee — 28 January 2010

You'll be surprised how often that you'll use event receivers instead of Workflow in order to implement functionality in Sharepoint; And who better to get you started with a simple guide to using them than Charles Lee?

Using LINQ Lambda Expressions to Design Customizable Generic Components

Michael Sorens — 27 January 2010

LINQ makes code easier to write and maintain by abstracting the data source. It provides a uniform way to handle widely diverse data structures within an application. LINQ’s Lambda syntax is clever enough even to allow you to create generic building blocks with hooks into which you can inject arbitrary functions. Michael Sorens explains, and demonstrates with examples.