Thank you all for the many comments. My intent was to initiate a conversation on the subject and I am gratified that the conversation occurred as I expected.

I absolutely agree. Within the software arena there are design standards that must be adhered to as a professional. Database design is a complex as any other facet of...

When I first got into consulting in 1995 I went hourly for the first time in 29 years of work. The company I went with Analysts International had three...

I agree with Steve in that using express edition may be appropriate to the task at hand. I believe that our job is to solve business problems through automation....

I have had concerns about storage as a service for some time. I remember doing technical sales of Microsoft CRM against SalesForce.com years ago. My primary selling point...

This article and the subsequent one are very well done from a technical perspective. I think more emphasis needs to be added as to why auditing needs to be...

I absolutely agree with Mr. Factor's assessment of the our business. Being able to address problems from the perspective of years of experience makes the boring consultant valuable. ...

I went back into programming in 1995 to avoid office politics.

In our organization we have several VM's with databases restored from production. They include a Local Development Server, Continuous Integration (CI), QA, UA, Mock, Test, Sandbox and DeployableBackup. ...

In our company sharing user passwords is a firing offense. As developers needing to troubleshoot user defined defects, we restore the production database to our development VM's and change...

I agree with Steve although I would the subject into different words.

Scientists build maintainable code and do not incorporate the latest technology without considering the ramifications. I...

I agree with Steve on all his points. I believe we need to get elementary and high school level teachers and counselors to understand that most of what we...

Having participated in the design and development of enterprise level integrations at several large organizations, I need to say the development team frequently has little to no input on decisions...

Andy address the issue in terms of using Access. Pipe-delimited files stored data before Access was presented to the community. I have observed the disdain for many types of...

Steve Jones is generally speaking on track with what he said. Having spent 15 years in management roles and 35 years in technical roles I can say I have...