02May 2011 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

I’ve got 99 Problems, but a disk ain’t one

nHibernate, Object Relational Mapping, SQL Server, T-SQL, Tools
Tom LaRock has a new meme for Meme Monday. It’s all about the problems caused in your system other than disks. Thankfully, despite the title, I don’t have to list 99 separate things, only 9, but you know what, 99 is possible. I’m going to present the problems. You find the solutions on your own today. Let’s go. Recompiles I’ve seen queries so big that they take more than three minutes to compile. That’s the edge case, but as an edge case it is educational. The most important thing to remember about recompiles is that they are driven by data changes. Once a threshold is reached on any given set of statistics, all queries referencing that set of statistics gets marked for recompile. The key words and tricky phrase here…
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21Mar 2011 by Grant Fritchey 10 Comments

Communication

Object Relational Mapping, SQL Server, T-SQL, Tools, Visual Studio
It sure seems like there’s a lot of miscommunication between developers and database specialists. In fact, the communication can become so poor that outright hostility between the groups is common. At the end of the day we are all working towards a common goal, to add value to whatever organization we are working for. It's a shame that we all lose sight of this commonality and create such a false dichotomy between the groups. I think there are some ways that we, as database specialists, can use to attempt to cross that gap. Prior to being suborned to the dark side, I was a developer. I had a little over 10 years experience working in VB, Java & C#. I remember, distinctly, cursing our database team for being so problematic…
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09Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Thoughts on ORM

nHibernate, Object Relational Mapping
I've posted before about issues I'm having either with behaviors of nHibernate, or behaviors of teams using nHibernate, but I don't think I've made my thoughts on ORM too clear. Let me do that now. I think some form of ORM is here to stay. There are lots of different ORM tools out there and acceptance of them is absolutely growing. Further, it should grow. Developing software is hard and if you can write code that reduces the overall amount of code you have to write, I'm in favor of it. I'm not convinced that the current crop of tools are quite as good as they ought to be, but most of them seem very flexible which should mean implementation of them can be, overall, beneficial to your project. That's…
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05Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey 25 Comments

nHibernate, First Look at TSQL

nHibernate
I've blogged in the past about the nHibernate project that has been going on at my company for the last eighteen months. Prior to today, I have only seen the database generated by nHibernate. But today I finally started seeing some TSQL code. My first impressions... oy! There are two levels of concern coming out of the gate. First, it appears that some of the programming decisions, completely independent of nHibernate, are going to cause problems. Second, it appears we're going to be hitting issues with nHibernate. First, the programming decision. I've been using Confio to monitor this server for a few days now (look for upcoming posts on my eval of Confio). Only one day has captured any real activity from the nHibernate team (and yes, I'm basically spying on…
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15Feb 2010 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

nHibernate Database, First Look

nHibernate
I'm getting my first look at a full-fledged nHibernate database developed by consultants for our company. I thought I'd share my initial impressions. I'll be capturing trace events from the database over the next couple of weeks, so I'll be following up on the behavior of nHibernate within this database as well. The first thing I saw & thought was, "Foreign key constraints. Thank the gods." That really is good news. I was frankly concerned that they might go with the "let the code handle it" approach. There are quite a few null columns. I'm also seeing tons & tons of nvarchar(255) which must the default string size. Lots of bit fields too. They also used bigint in a lot of places too. None of this is definitively good or bad,…
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01Dec 2009 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

How do -You- use SQL Server

nHibernate, SQL Server, T-SQL, Tools, Visual Studio
I've been tagged by a misplaced yankee, uh, New Englander, whatever. The question is, how do I/we use SQL Server where I work. That's a tough one. It would make a much shorter, and easier, blog post to describe the things we don't use it for. However, keeping with the spirit of these tags, I'll try to lay out it. For those that don't know, I work for a rather large insurance company. This means that we have lots and lots of databases, but not much data. We also are cheap. That means we'll run an app into the ground rather than spend the money & time to replace it. We have apps still running from the 70's and 80's propped up by ancient men with pocket protectors, spit, bailing wire…
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17Jun 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Object Database Editorial

nHibernate, Object Relational Mapping, SQL Server
I never used to read editorials. Not in emails, magazines, newspapers, whatever. Now, I make it a point of always reading them. You can learn as much from an editorial as you can from the technical articles within, sometimes more. Tony Davis has just posted a guest-editorial over at SQL Server Central. Tony is normally the editor at Simple-Talk, where he also writes interesting editorials. This one is not to be missed. It makes a very clear, and concise case for why object databases have a fundamental flaw for most business needs (not all, not always, but a pretty hefty majority). It's worth a read.
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