Right off the bat, the "CodeBetter" guys did not give any sort of collective "seal of approval" to the Linq to Entities Framework -- and why the hell would it matter even if we did? I found the Entities Framework to be intriguing for its potential and underlying technical foundation...

I relearned a couple of lessons today about working with database intensive applications. Fortunately, I was merely writing test automation code and I caught my problems fairly quickly, but... You should get the System DateTime.Now in a consistent manner. It's either assigned by the database clock...

I promised myself that I wouldn't ever make another post about stored procedures , but Eric's post on sproc's hit a few of my hot buttons on the subject. Four years ago the pre-Agile, VB6/ASP coding me would have fervently agreed with Eric's pro-sproc stance and I wrote PL/SQL by the bushel full, but...

A fairly common topic with TDD practitioners, both newbie and experienced, is how the heck to unit test business logic with a database hanging around. I’ve had several conversations lately about this so I thought I’d get a post about it. Before I try to talk about some strategies for this, here are a...

Pure diatribe ahead: Take a look at this code and ignore any concerns over security just at the moment: public class MyConfiguration { public static string ConnectionString { get { // lookup the connection string wherever it is string connectionString = lookupValue("CONNECTION_STRING"); return connectionString;...

Our Continuous Integration talk Monday got a bit rushed at the end and I missed an important point when we talked about CI with databases. For the love of all that is good and holy in the world create a separate database/schema for: Each development workstation Build environment Test environment A "Sheep...

My poor colleague (martyr) is trying to debug a production issue with some system generated emails today. If I can get the facts straight, the chain of calls goes: ASP "Classic" page calling into a... Stored Procedure that calls... Another Stored Procedure that calls... A third Stored Procedure that...

...you don't know where they've been, or who's been touching them. I've been burned pretty badly in the past by making assumptions about existing databases. Database documentation isn't always helpful either, because it is out of date or just wrong to begin with. Even if the documentation is "correct...

From my perspective the .Net world is clearly becoming more sophisticated in our approach to persistence. Reusable persistence solutions like NHibernate or NEO are starting to become more popular, reducing the need or desire to work with ADO.NET directly. However, most of the .Net systems out there that...

Periodically I see or engage in an argument over the usage of stored procedures. I think a lot of these types of arguments are somewhat unproductive because the combatants are thinking and talking about radically different things. Besides, I think the argument over the proper role of stored procedures...