Ben Johnston

Apple announces new iPhone features, including joining the AI race, but it offers little that wasn’t already available on Android

The most striking part of the new OnePlus Nord 4 is the unibody metal build – but is there more to it than just a marketing USP?

This is the second part of my series on auditing SQL Server. In the first part, I discussed basic server discovery and documentation. It covered some items to check at the hardware level and configuration items, but this section gets into more detailed hardware auditing details. It took me a while to decide how to best present the approach for this audit. My first two drafts included hardware, server, and database audits in the same document. This is simply too much, so I have divided these three sections. The current section focuses on hardware and cloud configuration items. I have placed the list of items I would recommend collecting at the start of this segment. Depending on your role in the organization, you will likely need to have others gather some of these configuration items and metrics for you.

This continues my series on auditing SQL Server. The fist parts covered discovery and documentation, server level hardware audits and SQL Server engine level audits. This section examines database configuration audits. As with the previous audit sections, the boundaries for the audit can be blurry. I try to stick to configuration items only, but I also discuss some code smells and items that can impact performance or might be covered in a code review. You will need to determine the scope of your audits and how much you want to cover in this portion of the audit.

An entire post on choosing the correct data types either seems like overkill or much needed and overdue. The perspective might vary based on the databases you’ve worked with recently. I decided to write this after seeing some code with data type decisions that I would classify as questionable. There are many decisions in technology that can be ambiguous, but the correct date type should be based on business rules and a set of technical guidelines. I am going to share my thought process for deciphering the correct type here.

Samsung’s big, beautiful Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 is the most excited I’ve been for an Intel laptop in a long time

Of all the concept tech I’ve seen at IFA 2024, I think that this portable, rechargeable concept TV has the best chance of going to market

The Samsung Galaxy S24 FE matches the AI and software support of its siblings but the price makes me wonder whether it’s really for the fans

The new Amazon Fire HD 8 tablets get more RAM and slightly better cameras – and they’re already massively discounted

SQL is easy to start writing. The basic syntax to start returning data is very simple. This low threshold for starting SQL hides some of the nuances that divide efficient queries from inefficient queries. As your SQL gets more complicated and you need to join multiple tables and perform intricate operations on the data, it is important to understand the basics of how queries are processed and how your query decisions impact performance.