Thomas LaRock
A common software development practice is to take data from a production system and restore it to a different environment, often called “test”, “development”, “staging”, or even “QA”. This allows for support teams to troubleshoot issues without making changes to the true production environment. It also allows for development teams to build new versions and … Read more
I am happy, honored, and humbled to receive the Microsoft Data Platform MVP award for the thirteenth straight year.
My life changed twenty years ago, this very month. I was a developer, working for a small software company outside of Boston. Our product was a warehouse management system, built with PowerBuilder on top of Oracle. We had a handful of large customers helping to keep the lights on, but a few went dark at … Read more
Last week I was reviewing an article and found myself needing information on the use of NOCOUNT as a standard for writing stored procedures. A quick internet search found this old post of mine, written back when I used to work for a living. Apparently, I was once asked to enable NOCOUNT for a specific … Read more
It’s been a year, people. A full year of remote meetings. And honestly, it’s as if you have learned nothing in that time. Remote meetings have a different dynamic that in-person meetings. I was hopeful the past year you would all come to understand this and adjust your habits accordingly. Well, I’m not afraid to … Read more
There’s something you should know about relational databases. They were designed to store data efficiently, protecting the quality of the data written and stored to disk. I’ve written before about relational engines favoring data quality and integrity, and how relational databases were not designed for the reading of data. Of course, if you are going through the trouble … Read more
