How many of you have heard me rant against using “SELECT * FROM tableName”? If you have I’m sure you’ve heard me mention the following reasons why SELECT * is evil. the more data you ask for, the longer it takes to return that data extra paging table locking hinders future attempts to create a…
Author: slowder
Microsoft SQL Azure FAQ
I was searching for news on Microsoft SQL Azure when I cam across this new FAQ. It answers a lot of the questions you may have, and several that I hadn’t thought to ask yet, like “how can you approximate the ROWGUID identifier… turns out using NEWID() will accomplish the same thing. I hadn’t thought…
What is SQL Azure?
I’ve been getting this question or some variant of it for weeks now. Some people are confusing SQL Azure with SQL 2008 R2, and some are thinking it’s SQL 2010. It’s neither of those. It’s its own beast. SQL Azure is a cloud version of the database management system you’ve all come to know and…
May the Forth Be With You!
While the actual anniversary for the original release of Star Wars in 1977 is still 20 days and some hours away, I’d like to do my best to remind you “The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It…
SugarCRM Announces SQL Azure Support
After the efforts Microsoft has put into supporting PHP, a major PHP development company has announced they are going to begin supporting Azure. This support, along with the ease of moving from Microsoft’s traditional SQL versions to SQL Azure “was simple and straightforward, taking just a couple weeks of development time, ” according to SugarCRM’s…
How Will Cloud Computing Affect You?
With all this talk about Windows Azure, SQL Azure, Amazon services and moving to the cloud, I start thinking to myself this all sounds somewhat familiar. Not quite Déjà vu, but it feels a little like that. Back in 1998, That ’70s Show went on the air. It made what was old seem new again….
Microsoft Continues to Support PHP
Microsoft continued their support of PHP by releasing a Community Technology Preview for the SQL Server Driver for PHP 2.0. With this release PHP developer can use PHP Data Objects with the SQL Server driver! This will serve to reduce the complexity of targeting multiple databases on the back end. As I’ve noticed before, Business…
Equals Sub Queries Versus Exists Sub Queries
I’d like to introduce you to the idea that you can replace an equal sub query with an exists sub query. Doing this can change a seek operation to a scan operation. This usually results in a faster query, with fewer resources used. Check out this example using the adventureworks database. USE AdventureWorks GO –…
Microsoft SQL Reporting Services for PHP
In an outstanding move on Microsoft’s part, Developers have released an open-source project to help PHP developers integrate SQL Server Reporting Services from their PHP applications! Using this new toolkit programmers can begin doing that today! This project offers a simple programming interface to: list available reports manage rendering of those reports and allow parameter…
Azure Tables or SQL Azure?
I’m beginning to see questions come up over “which should I use, SQL Azure or Azure Table Services?” The answer for now seems to be, “it depends.” Azure Tables seem to have better pricing. The scalability also seems to be a push. SQL Azure will be quicker to learn for most of us, since it…