Click here to monitor SSC
A technical journal and community hub from Redgate

  •  
RSS Feed

Latest content

Tony Davis

Ooh R

by , 30 January 2015 3 comments

Why has Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics, the company who provide open source distributions of R, alongside commercial “Enterprise” extensions for big data infrastructures? R is a programming language and platform for data manipulation, time series analysis, statistical modelling and graphics. Read more...

Robert Sheldon

Questions About T-SQL Control-of-Flow Language You Were Too Shy to Ask

by , 26 January 2015 1 comment

Surely, we all know how T-SQL Control-of-flow language works? In fact it is surprisingly easy to get caught out. What, for example, do the BREAK, RETURN and CONTINUE keywords do, precisely, in their various contexts? the answers to this and other questions aren't all entirely obvious, but we're too shy to ask them in public, and risk displaying our ignorance. Read more...

Ambily Kavumkal Kamalasanan

Customizing Team Foundation Server 2013

by , 26 January 2015 0 comments

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) manages workflow of software development projects. It is designed for the typical development. If it doesn't support all your team development activities, you can extend it by various means, including the creation custom controls or new work items. Read more...

Rodney Landrum

The Target of Your Defection

by , 23 January 2015 0 comments

I was a bit nervous this morning. I had been tasked with adding two SQL instances back into a master/target (MSX/TSX) relationship so that they would receive updated job code that had a new DFS share backup maintenance plans. Why was I nervous? Well, nervous might not be the right word. Read more...

Dennes Torres

Centralize Your Database Monitoring Process

by , 26 January 2015 3 comments

SQL Server Data Collector, together with Management Data Warehouse, is a fine and useful component for gathering information centrally about how SQL Server instances are being used, and thereby keeping an eye out for problems. It comes into its own when you have figured out how to configure it to run on maybe hundreds of instances using Central Management Server. Dennes describes how to tame the system so that it scales. Read more...

Nick Harrison

ASP.NET MVC Security through Validation

by , 20 January 2015 1 comment

ASP.NET MVC provides a way of providing declarative validation of user inputs. It removes a lot of the tedium of this important task. Nick Harrison explains how to do it, and also points out why it is so important to provide input validation Read more...

Phil Factor

A Start with Automating Database Configuration Management

by , 16 January 2015 0 comments

For a number of reasons, it pays to have the up-to-date source of all the databases and servers that you're responsible for in a central archive, in version control, and this is a job that is best automated. If you enlist the help of SQL Compare Pro, you can create a Powershell-based system that can be extended to warn you of changes, roughly when they happened, with a report of exactly what changed and how. Read more...

Steve Smith

Release Testing Is Risk Management Theatre

by , 21 January 2015 2 comments

"You cannot inspect quality into a product" - Harold Dodge. The adoption of Continuous Delivery often leads to the discovery of suboptimal practices within an organisation, and the Release Testing antipattern is a common example. Steve Smith explores the questions: what is Release Testing, and why is it an example of Risk Management Theatre? Read more...

Dino Esposito

Revisiting Partial View Rendering in ASP.NET MVC

by , 15 January 2015 10 comments

For any browser-based application, it makes sense to load into the web page just the content that is immediately required and avoid whole-page refreshes whenever possible. Ajax technology and JSON makes this partial-rendering easy. It is, however, worth considering ASP.NET's own partial-rendering techniques, returning HTML. It requires less client-logic and is quicker to implement. Read more...

Grant Fritchey

Why Developers Need to Understand Execution Plans

by , 12 January 2015 11 comments

As a coder, the more you know about the business, the better code you're going to write. The more you know about the language in which you code regularly, the better code you're going to write. Similarly, if you're tasked with writing code against a relational database engine, you're going to need to know more about that engine. If you can examine and understand execution plans, you can achieve better understanding of the database system and you will write better database code. Grant Fritchey shows you how. Read more...

Simple-Talk Database Delivery

DLM
Patterns & Practices Library

Visit our patterns and practices library to learn more about database lifecycle management.

Find out how to automate the process of building, testing and deploying your database changes to reduce risk and make rapid releases possible.

Get started

Recent Blog Posts

Tony Davis

Tony Davis

Ooh R

Simple-Talk Editorial Team

Simple-Talk Editorial Team

Caption Competition 21 – Journey Into Mystery

Rodney Landrum

Rodney Landrum

Finishing at the Starting Line: The Screenplay

Rodney Landrum

Rodney Landrum

The Target of Your Defection

Damon Armstrong

Damon Armstrong

SharePoint Apps and Fixing the “Provided App Differs from Another App with the Same Version and Product ID” Issue

View all blogs

Free Stuff

SQL Server Performance Tuning Using Wait...

Under the Hood of .NET Memory Management

SQL Backup and Restore

SQL Server Hardware

The Red Gate Guide to SQL Server Team-based...

Why Join

Over 400,000 Microsoft professionals subscribe to the Simple-Talk technical journal. Join today, it's fast, simple, free and secure.

Join Simple-Talk!