An Avanade Blogging Community

I have been giving a great deal of consideration to the ethics of data storage and manipulation lately. I have documented in the past certain extreme lapses in database security and additional lapses are routinely reported. The recent indictment of Read More

One of the things we often forget as software developers is that, after we are finished writing our brilliant code, someone will need to actually operate the system we have created. Frankly, no matter how spectacular our code may be, there is no way we can anticipate everything that may change in a system, or the myriad ways other developers and the user community might change requirements or otherwise play with our heads. Read More

My wife has a habit of checking to make sure the door is locked when we leave the house. She checks not once, not twice, but three times. Perhaps she could bottle that habit and sell it to developers who do not check their inputs for malicious attacks. Read More

I finally had a chance to catch up on some back issues of MSDN magazine today.  It is a task I generally put off as MSDN is targeted towards developers and, with all due respect, developers know nothing about databases, right? Like most database Read More

Should someone at Microsoft come across this little missive, please consider changing the DtsContainer.LoggingOptions property from read only to read/write. Read More

  When creating SSIS packages, one typically just accepts the default values at the time the package is created, then moves on to the “more important stuff”, like the actual code.    One of those default settings is “Delay Validation.”  Read More

One of the most convenient features of SSIS is its ability to create and load flat file sources. In particular, this allows a developer to dump “bad” or non-conforming data into a flat file that can be used to fix data issues at a later date or otherwise log mistakes and cover the technical person’s derriere. Read More

The new CTP preview for SQL 2008 is now available at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6a39affa-db6e-48a9-82e4-4efd6705f4a6&DisplayLang=en Read More