LINQ: The Good, The Bad, and The Poorly Optimized (Part 1)
Sep 12,
2017
Part I: LINQ and sp_executesql Numerous questions raised in numerous forums mention that LINQ to SQL wraps queries in a call to the stored procedure sp_executesql. There seems to be agreement that this is done to ensure the caching of the query and query parameterization (if, indeed, parameters are supplied). Some advantages to sp_executesql, like […]
Analyzing SQL Server Data with R and RODBC
Jul 18,
2017
Down the Rabbit Hole with RODBC The most direct method for reading SQL Server data into the statistical program R is with ODBC. If R is running on a Windows system, this is straightforward using the R package RODBC. On a Linux system, the installation of RODBC is more challenging. Of course, RODBC requires a […]
Why Should You Pursue a Microsoft Certification?
Jun 28,
2017
If you’re considering taking a Microsoft Official Curriculum course (or your company is considering sending you to one) you should know that it’s a good choice for both of you. The most obvious benefit of taking a Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) course is that you’re getting information about Microsoft technologies from the source. Coupled with […]
Patch Your Samba Servers or Risk a Worse Version of WannaCry
May 31,
2017
The big cybersecurity news of the past couple of weeks has been the WannaCry worm. It took advantage of some rather old bugs, dating back to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. We got lucky! The vulnerability, the problems in the targets, allowed unlimited abuse. But the exploit, the attackers’ code, had a built-in “kill […]
New Features in C# 7
May 16,
2017
In this article, we’ll look at some of the new language features of C# 7 that will help us write cleaner, less buggy code in a shorter time. Binary literals In C# 6 we can currently represent integers in decimal or hexadecimal formats. int d = 42; int h = 0x2A; In C# 7, we […]
