It's incredibly concerning. The most worrying thing is that, having gotten onto some list through bad data matching or a poor algorithm, it's often incredibly hard to get off, because...

• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by  ben.mcintyre.

This stuff is horrible, but I know why it's out there.

In the early days of SQL Server, Windows NT/2000 could log on with Windows Auth, but Windows 95/98/ME...

Good point.
A major issue with software quality is the fact that you can't 'see' it unless you've got serious tech skills.
I often use the analogy when explaining...

Too true. Great post.
It's always mystified me how unqualified your general coder/DBA/IT Person is. As someone who has been through university and has an engineering degree and does freelance...

Thought I might have heard a ghostly voice whisper 'ORM ... ORM' at some point in there.

I think this was because of an MS Access component. MS Access didn't recognise BIGINT at the time (2000).

The NUMERICS are everywhere, there have been no problems with them to...

Kim: just for posterity, no, all the joins in the database have identical data types on each side.

The two different ID types reflect only that some tables might conceivably...

Interesting. It seems a like the query plan alternatives are perhaps a bit fractal and sometimes you just end up with a really bad one.

I had an interesting experience as...

There is something very like Query Analyser for MS Access now:

https://www.arrow-of-time.com/AXF.aspx

(disclosure: this is my product)

Gail is right.

StackOverflow is an excellent resource for all things programming and probably a better place to ask.

But for a quick answer, get yourself DotNet Reflector from RedGate, or...

I think maybe the manager who thought that system up was a '2'.

I've been on teams before where people have expressed feeling positive about having a few 'grey-hairs' (trans: older people) along, to keep the young cowboys honest I suppose.

After many years...

It's a principle I've been interested in for a while, because I live in a very remote area (Central Australia) with unreliable and often very slow internet (eg. 35 kbit/s...

I'm a Mac user, and I use Virtualbox to run Windows on my Mac laptop. (Virtualbox runs on Mac, Win, *ix)

After a recent laptop hardware failure I needed to run...