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In the 1990s I coded on a few systems where the architecture was that we attached database functionality to our business objects, so you could do something like     someObject.Value = 4;   someObject.Save();   While this looks appealing, this pattern (I later learned that it is called active record) has fallen out of ...

It is common practice to use a partitioning function to scale out a solution. For example, you may divide a database among four equal geographical regions and have four separate installations of the database each with the same database but only a quarter of the data. When these four databases outgrew the single physical infrastructure they could ...

As technology and engineering zealots there is nothing we can't build. Seriously. It is all a question of time, resource and budget. And there's the rub. There comes a point in almost any business process where we hit those points of diminishing returns with technology. All those edge cases where the coincidence of a series of unfortunate events ...

Abstractions are a beautiful thing, and it is said that any problem in technology can be solved with another level of abstraction or indirection. Tremendous. But like with most things, there is a flip side. Once upon a time you would program by hardwiring hardware. This evolved to general purpose hardware and machine code. Higher level ...

So I just got back from TechEd Barcelona, and I had a great conference in no small part due to the people I went with: Merrick Chaffer, James Dawson and Paul McMillan. This is a selection of some of Conchango's finest from the world of .Net development, infrastructure and SQL Server. One of the reasons the conference was so much more enjoyable ...

Strength, utility and beauty.  Here we will be exploring a number of the traditional “ilities” of software architecture and seeing how they can be related to these three architectural qualities.  These three qualities have been around for quite a while, under their Latin names of firmitas, utilitas and venustas, and were ...

Message ordering is a key concept in a service orientated architecture. It is a key concept, because one of the core tenets of SOA is that a service must remain autonomous. In remaining autonomous, a service must be able to deal with any unexpected circumstance of messages sent to it, including the possibility of messages being received out of ...