Welcome to blogs.conchango.com

Shrink yourself to the size of an ant and think of a classic server as a mini data centre. Banks upon banks of memory, multiple disks, many CPU cores and even network interfaces. The OS manages all of the many processes and threads, sharing the resources amongst them and when they demand more resource it makes it available to them – on demand and ...

Lets face it – most IT systems don’t really work as well as we would like.  Surely by now we would have figured out how to build systems where you don’t have to have a different username/password for ever system accompanied by different ‘forgot password’ functionality for the same?  Surely by now someone would have figured out, and ...

It was pointed out to me recently that my critical position on SQL Data Services and support for Azure in general are inconsistent, so I thought that a bit of clarification is required. SQL Server is my database of choice and have been using it since version 4.21, which was long before it became mainstream and I even spent a couple of years on ...

Of late one may have noticed that I have become very interested in high-brow, generally vaporous, disciplines such as RESTful data services, data interoperability and cloud computing whilst coincident with that has been the inexorable rise of the term “mashup” in the information technology lexicon. “Mashup” means different things to different ...

In the battle of the public vs private clouds, the lines have been drawn between those that offer infrastructure for use in existing data centres and those that offer platforms and services in their own data centres.  The discussions, while technically based, are philosophical, passionate, opinionated and about the market laggards trying to ...

Microsoft has been talking about the processes, procedures and certification in their data centres – responding to the need to provide a level of trust and confidence for customers wishing to run their applications on the Microsoft cloud.  The story was picked up by the Hoff where he ponders some of the detail, but it as a comment by Allen ...

Of all the EMC press releases that appeared last week, it was this one on some ‘New Cloud Storage Service’ that caught my eye.  Not because I know anything about cloud storage however, it was the mention of AT&T, as a major telecoms provider, that renewed my continued wish that, as a consumer, cloud storage would start getting closer to ...

Jamie and I gave presentations last night at the London SQL Server users group.  It was a good evening but I think I managed to upset about half the people there.  I suppose when your first two slides are these… …then you can expect a bit of an uphill battle. But, the other half seemed to enjoy it, and besides, if I am not pissing ...

On Thursday this week Jamie Thomson (of SSIS Junkie fame) and I will be presenting at the London SQL Server User Group which will be held at Microsoft’s offices in Cardinal Place and you can still register for the event online.  The pre-planned topic is ‘SQL Server in the Cloud’ and JRJ, who normally organizes the event, is out of town – so ...

As much as I avidly support cloud technologies and as much as I prefer using SQL Server, I can’t come up with a convincing reason to use or recommend SQL Data Services. SDS simply has no compelling (or obvious) business case. The reason for this is a limitation built in to SDS of a database size from 5GB-10GB, with a promise from Microsoft that ...