Most definitely.

Most common situation is a version-upgrade of the application where the schema is changing and data needs to be migrated (especially when a normalization-change is involved).

The standard pattern for...

There really three stories to this: hardware, software and business. Each has a completely different life cycle, but are often tied to each other at the time they were developed.

-...

That is because the new table and its constraints, indexes, etc, although having...

ModestyBlaise84 (4/26/2011)

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In my opinion, adding a trigger to the production database; creating a table in production database, dropping a table from production database, creating a job in production database -...

Great article Solomon!

I've often used similar methods during migrations. Even on small datasets (achieving sub-second deployment of new releases, a great feature for websites, a similar trick can be used...

Most of the responses here are about what I believe Andy would see as the Version 1. But he talks about the step BEFORE diving in too deep into this....

It is definitely not the answer to most common real-world full-business data requirements. BUT it is certainly a candidate for some niche problems where either a full RDBMS is overkill...

@Ron Porter: reading the article my thoughts ran exactly as your post (thank you for saving me the time to write it up myself ;))

@blandry: Please...

When I pay the premium for a SQL server edition with fail-over capabilities, I consider having paid for the use (license) of those capabilities!

No matter how I choose to implement...

Craig Farrell (1/29/2011)

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That said, the downtime aspect of any system must be lumped together. There is only one set of people that care about what's happening on the backend....

Elliott Whitlow (1/18/2011)

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I'm thinking we are putting duties and obligations onto SSIS and other ETL packages that are outside their function or responsibility. I expect developers to follow our...

@eric, so what if the exported data doesn't contain the names of customers, but DOES contain actual sales-figures of the company, sure a hacker can make use of...

[p]Tapes proven technology????? Proven to be unreliable as hell! I cannot count the number of horror stories I've heard about unreadable tapes when it mattered most (including the first one...

umailedit (7/28/2010)

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"Windows has gone from protecting the computer from outside to protecting the computer even from the owner. Though it can't prevent your son from installing trojans it will...

Matt Miller (#4) (7/27/2010)

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If you run under a non-privileged account, the trojan would fail to install or do its thing (which is the whole reason why they keep telling us...