The Windows Azure Queue component, like all Windows Azure components (Roles, Storage, App Fabric, SQL Azure) can be used by itself or with other Windows Azure components. That’s why I refer to Windows Azure as “Distributed Computing” rather than “cloud”. Having a distributed off premise queue has a lot of use-cases. An interesting use-case is ...

As most of you know, I don’t like the term “cloud” very much. It isn’t defined, which means it can be anything. I prefer “distributed computing”, which is more technically accurate and describes what you’re doing in more concrete terms. So when you think about Windows and SQL Azure, you don’t have ...

“Git-Go” is something we say in the South that means “right at the start”. I’ve seen several applications for on-premise systems that don’t have much in the way of diagnostics - the developers rely on a debugger, the event logs on the server and client workstation, and most of all, the ability to watch the system from end-to-end. This approach ...

A while back, I was working on a short article about Normalization for a book that never got published (admittedly I wasn’t getting paid for the article, and it wasn’t for charity, so I wasn’t that broken up over it.)  The task at hand was to, in 2 pages or less, describe the process of normalization and help you to know when you have ...

At SQLRally, we brought along an iPad to demonstrate that monitoring doesn't have to be web-based to be mobile. We fielded a lot of questions about this, the most common one being, ''Whoa, is that native?'' No, it was not native... we were using remote desktop (RDP). While yes, it can be an extra step (or two, if you need to VPN) to go ...

Most mature development shops use various code diagrams to give a symbolic representation of high-level and database code structures. Standards such as Business Process Model Notation (BPMN), Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERD) and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) are a few I use all the time. In the Distributed Computing (Cloud Computing) ...

This is one in a series of posts on when and where to use a distributed architecture design in your organization's computing needs. You can find the main post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx Description: Some applications lend themselves for the entire architecture to be ...

So I was blissfully reading the twitter feed when @Tim_Mitchell tweeting the following article Consultants are pros, while corporate IT staff are minor leaguers by Erik Eckel, that for some reason seems to exist to feed the need that IT staffers have to despise consultants who come in and are listened to, often when there are hyper qualified IT ...

I was just writing a response to a comment on my ''Sell Yourself!'' presentation (http://sqlblog.com/blogs/michael_coles/archive/2010/12/05/sell-yourself-presentation.aspx#comments), and it started getting a little lengthy so I decided to turn it into a blog post.  The ''Sell Yourself!'' post got a couple of very good comments on the ...

In many organizations, there’s a push to save cost. “Cost” is an integral part of a profit-and-loss statement in the organization. Even if you work in a non-profit organization, cost control is central. Of course, you can take cost-control too far. You could, for instance, remove the shipping costs from your company, but if you ...