I'd rather play golf

Lately my staff and I have spent some effort looking at SQL Anywhere’s support for SELECT TOP N and SELECT TOP N START AT M. SQL Anywhere has supported Microsoft’s SELECT TOP N syntax for several releases, and in Version 9 introduced support for the START AT variant to permit the specification of the starting [...]

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In a recent blog post on the SQL Server Magazine website, columnist Itzik Ben-Gan describes some Transact-SQL language features that will disappear from the next release of Microsoft SQL Server, and in addition some language features that are planned to be eliminated in versions after that. These deprecated features are, of course, of interest to [...]

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Bill-of-materials (transitive closure) queries are reasonably common. Without recursion, the only way to compute a bill-of-materials result with a single SQL statement is through self-outer-joins, and the problem with self-joins, of course, is that one has to know in advance how many levels to traverse–that is, how many outer joins to code within the query. [...]

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Recently, Charles Levine of Microsoft posted a response on the SQL Server performance blog, entitled TPC-E: Raising the bar on OLTP Performance, to my article from 3 October entitled The State of TPC-E. In this post, I’d like to respond to some of the statements Mr. Levine made in his commentary, which are indented below: [...]

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With the widespread adoption of virtualization within data centers, and the anticipated growth of virtualized data centers (to the tune of 10K nodes, if one believes Irfan Amad of VMWare) it is pretty clear that in addition to the scalability issues, two additional problems need to be solved: The first, mentioned to me by my [...]

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Last year, Brian Moran of SQL Server Magazine wrote this post, and more recently followed it with another post from 25 September of this year, wondering why, after an entire year, only Microsoft SQL Server is the database platform for any TPC-E benchmark. In his more recent article, Mr. Moran postulates: I haven’t been able [...]

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The May/June issue of ACM Queue magazine (and the final one in print form) is devoted to object-relational mappings and ORM software. This issue features four articles on ORM technology from differing perspectives, and is an excellent introduction to the technology and its potential pitfalls. The articles include: An interview with Erik Meijer and Jose [...]

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I’d like to draw your attention to the March 2008 issue of the IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, whose editor-in-chief is David Lomet of Microsoft Research. The March 2008 issue concerns performance and correctness testing of database systems, and there are two papers in particular in that issue that I’d like to describe briefly. The first [...]

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One of Hibernate’s strengths is its ability to work with a wide variety of database systems. One of the ways in which it is able to do so is including a Java layer that customizes the SQL statements being sent to the underlying DBMS to match the dialect and feature set of that particular system. [...]

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Transaction semantics (ACIDity) and concurrency control are critical to both application correctness and application performance. But before I discuss Hibernate in these areas, a personal story. About three years ago I had the experience of withdrawing money from my chequing account through an ATM when the ATM crashed. At the point the ATM crashed, I [...]

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