Having a Little Fun at SQL Server Central
Voice of the DBA
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Testing is Becoming More Important
Voice of the DBA
Many of us know that testing our code is important. The adoption of unit testing by many software application developers as a normal course of business has dramatically improved the quality of applications. Mobile software, especially, has benefited from the requirement for most software to include, and constantly run, a suite of unit tests. For database software, I find relatively few organizations formally test their database code. A few people have adopted or the , but most don't bother. In fact, many queries that are embedded in application code, or built by ORMs, aren't tested beyond a...
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Can You Let Go of Determinism
Voice of the DBA
Why do we reboot machines when something goes wrong? I'm sure all have done it, and I would guess quite a few of you have found situations where this seems to fix issues, but there isn't an underlying root cause that you can pinpoint. This is a fairly accepted way of dealing with issues, but have you thought about why this is a way to solve some problems? The main thing that a reboot does is return the system to a know starting state. It's why quite a few people complain about some modern laptops and mobile devices because they avoid restarts and try to sleep/wake instead. Most software...
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Doing Good at SQL Server Central
Voice of the DBA
This is part of a few memories from the founders of SQL Server Central, celebrating 25 years of operation this month. We did photoshoots at Redgate many years ago. We had a bunch of props, including some phrases written down. We could create our own, but my handwriting is atrocious (likely why I never became an architect), but I ended up with this one: Read the rest of
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Engineer Lessons
Voice of the DBA
Many of you reading this have a number of years working with technology. You might have 1 year or 20 years, but you've likely grown and learned along the way. Some of you may also know someone who has several years of seniority in a position but not that many years of experience. In this case, a person might have been working at this job for 5 years, but they really have one year of experience that's been repeated 5 times. That's been a common complaint over quite a few years from people who interview others. They find candidates often have very limited experience, yet are applying for senior...
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Expanding into Print
Voice of the DBA
This is part of a few memories from the founders of SQL Server Central, celebrating 25 years of operation this month. When we started SQL Server Central, our goal was to build a great resource that helped other people advance in their careers and also made some money. Our decisions in building the site were based around the digital world and treating the community as we would want to be treated. Over time, however, we realized that continuing to grow this business was hard in a digital-only world. We experimented and proposed helping others build similar sites, like ReportingServicesCentral...
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The Power of Data and Privacy
Voice of the DBA
I tend to be fairly careful with data, especially data on this site. When we started the site, we were worried about potential issues and worked hard to ensure we kept our systems safe and limited the attack surface area for personal information. We also declined the various offers we had to sell our list of subscribers to marketing firms. We know that some places add value for marketing, but some abuse the trust of their users and our approach was always to be careful. When we sold the site to Redgate, we emphasized the need for this trust, and to date, Redgate has been a great steward of...
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The DBA is Dead; Long Live the DBA
Voice of the DBA
I remember getting a job at a startup in the Denver Tech Center. This was shortly after SQL Server 7 was released, with a marketing campaign that the platform was auto-tuning and wouldn't require a DBA. My colleague asked me if I wanted to learn Cold Fusion and have a longer career. I declined and stuck with this SQL Server thing, which has seemed to work out pretty well over the years. I was reminded of this when I saw a "" post, this time from an Oracle DBA. There are plenty of links in there from Larry Ellison and Oracle about how some version of Oracle won't require a DBA. I've seen (and...
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When SQL Server Central Went Down
Voice of the DBA
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Expensive CPUs
Voice of the DBA
There have been a lot of features added to the SQL Server platform over the years. Several of these features let us perform functions that are beyond what a database has traditionally been designed to handle. SQL Server has had the ability to , , and in SQL Server 2025, we can . Quite a few of these features (arguably) are more application-oriented than database-oriented. There's nothing inherently wrong with having a server perform some of these functions, and there have been some very creative implementations using these features. I recently ran into , where she shows how to use the...
info_outlineEvery once in a while I find a fun post that makes fun of programming. I think because the author is struggling with some piece of code, they write about the craziness of software development, often with an analogy that compares building something in the real world to how software programs get written. Here's one, with a bridge construction analogy, that degenerates into a rant on the disparate ways in which different programmers work together and how the entire world of the Internet is held together in a constant patch-fix loop.
I do think that most large software applications have a decent amount of inconsistency. I'd suspect most large databases (in terms of object count), also have a variety of techniques, tools, and standards in use. That's because the tooling that we use to build things change. We don't have the constraints of the real world, which is why we could have a stored procedure using a subquery to calculate a running total and another one that uses the OVER() clause.
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