VPN Software should come with big warning labels: ''WARNING: Does not play well with others.''As a consultant I frequently need to gain access to remote networks via VPN. This means I'm frequently hosing myself by installing yet another VPN client. That, and I hate connecting to the vast majority of VPNs because they hose my network settings ...

As a consultant, it's not uncommon for me to need to rewrite a poorly performing query or sproc without a full understanding of the underlying biz rules or context. Improved performance is the stated goal, but data fidelity is implied as critical. Enter unit testing - something many of us rely upon heavily during 'normal' development at ...

So, your application was a success. You're getting oodles and oodles of traffic. Only, it's building up faster than you had anticipated, and after a bit of calculation, you've determined that if the present trends persist, you'll have 24 TB of data within 1 year. Only, you really don't need data > 3 months old in the main OLTP ...

In a previous life (actually two previous lives), I was a production DBA. One of the environments that I inherited had some ... issues. There were a number of Clustered SQL Server installations -- oodles of hardware, all churning to keep product inventory, customer information, and catalog browsing going for a number of web farms for a ...

T-SQL is vast. Think about it: it allows for the creation and control of everything from indexes, tables, data-cubes, full-text indexes, full/differential/log backups, statistic optimization, and on and on and on. Unless you've been using SQL Server since version 4.2 there's entirely too much syntax (along with nuances, variations, etc) to master. ...