Ajarn Mark Caldwell Blog

Bringing Business Sense to the IT World…

SQLPrompt Revisited

A couple of months ago, I wrote a quick post about SQLPromptwhich had been purchased by Red-Gate Software. I have been using it since then and it really has proven to be a handy tool. Read more →

Top 10 Blog Design Mistakes

Jakob Nielsen, a renowned web design and usability expert, has come up with the Top 10 Design Mistakes for Weblog Usability. You might think, from the title, that there is nothing you can do because you did not design your weblog, you are using someone else's software. Read more →

How NOT to Select Records

From The Daily WTF... How NOT to SELECT records in your database. Apparently in his version of SQL Server, WHERE clauses only work on Temp tables. Legacy Comments Brett 2004-09-01 re: How NOT to Select Records That's great. Read more →

What Language do you THINK in?

A question on SQLTeam a few weeks ago got me thinking about the idea of what language you THINK in. Do you remember the movie Firefox? (Okay, that came out in 1982, before some of you were even born, but at the time I was a Clint Eastwood fan and into military aircraft, so back off! Read more →

How Many Test/QA Instances do you Need?

A while back, I blogged about having separate dev, test/QA, and production environments. Recently, I was discussing with one of my clients the fact that they really needed more than one test/QA environment because they needed specific scenarios in their data to test the functionality of a broad spectrum of code paths. Read more →

Scripts and Source Control - 102

In the comments section of my SCRIPT IT post, Lisa asked a couple of questions for clarification. These were a good reminder to me that some of the things that I just take for granted these days are actually very new concepts to others who haven't had the same experience. Read more →

SCRIPT IT! SCRIPT IT!! SCRIPT IT!!!

If you use Enterprise Manager (EM) to create or edit table structures, data, stored procedures, or much of anything else, you are a rookie. Now, each one of us was a rookie at some point, and you do have to start somewhere, but if you want to be considered a professional, you HAVE TO learn the SQL syntax and get comfortable living in Query Analyzer (QA). Read more →