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Simple Talk

Normalisation and 'Anima notitia copia' (Soul of the Database)

Phil, in a guest editorial for Simple-Talk, puzzles over the possibility that a SQL Server System table commits sins against relational theory. Maybe the answer isn't that simple....

A Testing Perspective of Controllers and Orchestrators

The neat separation between processing and rendering in ASP.NET MVC guarantees you an application design that is inherently teastable. It doesn't guarantee that your application will be well-designed and quick to test. For that, attention to use-cases and the...

Tuning Red Gate: #2 of Many

In the last installment, I used the SQL Monitor tool to get a snapshot view of the current state of the servers at Red Gate that are giving us trouble. That snapshot suggested some areas where I should focus some time, primarily in which queries were being...

TortoiseSVN and Subversion Cookbook Part 4: Sharing Common Code

Michael Sorens continues his series on Source Control with Subversion and TortoiseSVN by describing several ways one can use to share code among several projects.

Tuning Red Gate: #1 of Many

Everyone runs into performance issues at some point, even Red Gate software. Some of our internal systems were running into some serious bottlenecks. What if I were to, oh, I don't know, use a certain monitoring tool to identify the bottlenecks, figure out...

How to Kill a Company in One Step or Save it in Three

The majority of companies that suffer a major data loss subsequently go out of business. Wesley David remembers vividly the day when the organisation he worked for found that they couldn't restore their data, and the subsequent struggles that ensued. Shoulda-woulda-coulda.

To Not CI to Eye

Many developers have argued persuasively that each database developer in a team needs to work as sole user of a dedicated database-development environment whilst creating or updating databases. I'm not so sure. Are we in danger of trying to change database...

Automated Script-generation with Powershell and SMO

In the first of a series of articles on automating the process of building, modifying and copying SQL Server databases, Phil Factor demonstrates how one can generate TSQL scripts for databases, selected database objects, or table contents from PowerShell and...

Using SQL Test Database Unit Testing with TeamCity Continuous Integration

With database applications, the process of test and integration can be frustratingly slow because so much of it is based on manual processes. Everyone seems to agree that automation of the process provides the answer to accomodating shorter development cycles,...

Converting String Data to XML and XML to String Data

We all appreciate that, in general, XML documents or fragments are held in strings as text markup. In SQL Server, XML variables and columns are instead tokenised to allow rapid access to the data within. This is fine, but can cause some odd problems, auch as...