The Successful Consulting Series is a set of articles that are being written to both, help decisions on joining the consulting field and also, help existing consultants in their professional development initiatives. Please visit, “Successful Consulting Series” for a full listing of each part in this series. I am one of those types that is always up for a challenge so it was nice that my zig zag career path brought me to the door of consulting.

This is day three of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at sargable queries. You might ask yourself, what is this weird term sargable. Sargable comes from searchable argument, sometimes also referred as Search ARGument ABLE. What that means is that the query will be able to use an index, a seek will be performed instead of a scan. In general any time you have a function wrapped around a column, an index won’t be used

Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of giving a session on the Belgian SQL Server Days. My session was about SSIS and the new features of Change Data Capture (CDC). With new features I mean the new SSIS 2012 components made by Attunity who simplify the manageability and usability of SSIS packages working with CDC, because technically CDC hasn't changed since its introduction in SQL Server 2008. The session went quite well (still waiting on attendee feedback), aside from some microphone problems who forced me to hold a replacement microphone in my left hand – quite difficult to do demos and use Zoomit – and a transaction that got stuck in SSMS and was stubborn enough not to roll back quickly.

Introduction Last week I asked if Spek was on a Maven repository so I could easily add it to my project and test it. Someone who will remain anonymous (who still needs to wash my car) and runs the Spek project told me it wasn’t and that I could be so nice to add it. I know next to nothing about Maven, except that it exists. So I went on the Google and found… a lot of things that I didn’t know about.

This is day two of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to take a look at how data types can have an impact in queries and also the size of your database. Char vs NChar SQL Server has two data types to store character data1, both of them come in fixed and variable length sizes. The char and varchar data type uses one byte of store to store one character, the nchar and nvarchar data type uses two bytes of store to store one character.

Introduction When learning a language it is important to know how to write unittests for it. Most modern languages have testing built in. And Kotlin is no exception. Kotlin has the kotlin.test namespace that has all the asserts you need. Configuration You will find plenty of examples how to write tests with Kotlin but something was escaping me because my tests would not run. Let’s take our class. package demo data class MyClass(val i : Int, val s : String) uhm yeah.

This post will demonstrate that there is a difference in performance if you don’t size your database file accordingly. It is a good practice to have your database sized correctly for the next 6 to 12 months, you don’t want your server wasting cycles with growing files all the time. Figure out how big your files are now, figure out how much they will grow in the next year and size your files accordingly, check back every month or so to see if your estimates were correct.

Last day of the training and I am glad it is over…this stuff is draining Here is what was covered today Network Programming Low Level TCP/IP Protocols IPv4 and IPv6 UDP Multicast TCP/IP Message Based protocols HTTP Connections framework using URL (Unified Resource Locator) Remote Objects RMI (Remote Method Invocation) CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) Optional packages supporting additional protocols SOAP, Mail etc etc We talked about port numbers, here are some common ones that you might know

The Successful Consulting Series is a set of articles that are being written to both, help decisions on joining the consulting field and also, help existing consultants in their professional development initiatives. Please visit, “Successful Consulting Series” for a full listing of each part in this series. Aptitude can be defined as talent. Don’t think this means that you can only be successful in consulting if you have a talent for technology.

Today was day four of our Java training, we looked at generics, collection and IO today, here is what was covered The Collections Framework Legacy Container Classes A container is an object that holds a collection of other objects An array is a simple container. Arrays have a couple of limitations . The size is fixed . All the members of the array must be of the same type . You can’t add methods and attributes to an array