I enjoy working at Quest Software partly because we do a lot to give back to the community. Here's one example, a free poster describing all of the SQL Server 2005 and 2008 dynamic management views. Get it here. It's the perfect compliment to the free system map poster available from Microsoft here. … [Read more...]
Toad Just Keeps Getting Better
Toad for SQL Server Wins Best of TechEd 2010 in the Database Development Category Toad and I go way back. I first started with Toad as a user on the Oracle DBMS back in the early 1990's. When I started at Quest Software back on January 2nd of 2002, one of the first products I tackled as a SQL Server product architect was Toad. How do we make this very popular Oracle product one that users in the SQL Server world will love too? And this challenge was made that much harder by the fact that Microsoft SQL Server ships with fantastic tools right there in the box. I haven't worked directly on … [Read more...]
Bitemporal Data
Any IT pro with more than a year or two of experience will have faced the challenges of version control for an application, but what if you have to implement version control for data? The most common way to tackle this problem is implementing something called "bitemporal data". Under this method, each row in a table includes the current valid time and the transaction time. Since two distinct time values are stored, we get the term bitemporal. A great place to start is Adam Machanic's excellent article at … [Read more...]