One of the more important tasks in the process of rolling out incremental developments to a multi-server production system is to double-check that all of the planned modifications, and nothing else, have been deployed. An Oracle expert, Bruce Armstrong, comes across SQL Compare for Oracle, and sees if it helps with this time-consuming task.

To make progress as a relational Database programmer, you have to think in terms of sets, rather than lists, arrays or sequential data. Until that point, you'll feel the need to pass lists, arrays and the like to functions and procedures. Joe suggests some unusual ways around the difficulty and broods on the power of the VALUES constructor.

In retrospect, it was probably the inclusion of the OUTPUT clause in the MERGE statement that gave SQL Server 2008 its most powerful SQL enhancement.. It isn't the easiest of features to explain, but Bob does it in his usual clear and careful way.

Often, there is a huge difference between software being easy to use, and easy to develop. When your pilot users tell you "by week three of any development project you've thrown out anything that takes time or just gets in your way", then it is time to be serious about usability, as well as quality. We decided to find out from some of those at the sharp end of the development of Red Gate's SQL Source Control.

Why are they here? Why is anyone?

If you ever feel uneasy when you set about handcrafting database maintenance jobs for SQL Server, it may be the voice of your conscience saying 'Ola, Ola!'. Follow your conscience. Ola Hallengren has already crafted a superb set of routines to do this for you. Why reinvent something that does it all, safely and well. Brad McGehee explains....

It's a little like having a security firm visit your house and tell you about the weaknesses that a criminal might exploit and best practices that you can adopt to make yourself less vulnerable. Alex covers clearly and explains how and why they could be problems before providing working examples of how to avoid getting caught out.

Quite often at Red Gate, we are some of our own most enthusiastic software-users. SmartAssembly is a case in point. In the words of the current IT cliché, 'we eat our own dogfood'. We sent Andrew Clarke to find out more....

It is an interesting time for any .NET developer wanting to develop software for mobile phones. We've always taken it for granted that there would be a good .NET platform for mobile phones. Surely Microsoft aren't going to fumble the key component, Windows Phone 7, after getting the development tools so right.

Djonatas Tenfen demonstrates in fine detail how to quickly and easily build a mashup Silverlight application to consume and manipulate multiple data sources, and plot airports' realtime status onto a map.

Its long been a constant concern of mine that there are changes being made to databases that I manage that will one day trip me up. Someone will add just one too many columns to a table, or even drop a table, and an application will stop working. When was the change made, who made it, why, was it tested before it was rolled into live?

It has been said by many people that C# is 'Java done right'. However, there is one feature not included in C# that I do miss from my time in Java - method override covariance - so I decided to see if anything could be done to add this small but useful feature to C#...

The latest evolution of VB in Visual Studio will bring with it a bundle of C# functionality, nudging the two languages even closer together. To ensure we're ready to make the most of these enhancements, Hima Vejella takes us through each new feature.

When Eli was writing a WPF MVVM tutorial, he decided to use .NET Reflector as his sample, and created a WPF UI for .NET Reflector using its public interface, mimicking the original. A WPF/Prism version of Reflector? Eli explains what he did, and supplies the complete project and source to Reflectoron

Jill's cloud looks like a winner.

Having introduced us to the basics of the new Code Access Security Model available in .NET Framework 4.0, Matteo Slaviero explains how to use this powerful new system to implement fine-grained code security in ways where have never before been possible.

Of all the original thinkers in IT, few are as original or as amusing as Don Woods. INTERCAL, Colossal Cave Adventure, the Jargon file and the New Hackers' Dictionary all owe much to his irresistible brand of humour, and his immense knowledge and experience in IT.

As part of our long-running Cribsheet series, we asked William to come up with a brief summary of what was involved in bringing database development work under source control. What are the advantages it brings, and are there disadvantages?

Some surfaces are easy to overlook.

The Row Count Spool operator is a simple component in an execution plan that can make an enormous difference to SQL query plans that would otherwise read a table on every row of the inner input to a nested loop. As this is a common type of query, it illustrates the power that a knowledge of your showplan operators can give you.