JSON Support in Sql Server 2016 CTP3.2 – Quick Start

The JSON has landed (in beta at least) – and I think it’s now some practical use. I’ve collected a few technical references here. There may not be a native JSON type yet, but there are workarounds to provide the kind of assurance control-freak RDBMS developers find comforting. I’ve shown some of them in the code sample below.

Cost-Based (Design) Optimisation

No, not the Oracle Cost-Based Optimizer – this is about optimising your design for (financial) cost; and no, it doesn’t mean that we as developers need to be worrying about pennies while we’re coding, or even that we have much influence on costs.

It’s just an interesting remark from a podcast by Brent Ozar here. At 20 minutes 14 seconds in,

Continuous Integration and Delivery in Databases

As you’ll know if you’re a database developer, the whole “continual integration and delivery” philosophy tends to get much more complicated when you have to preserve data and aren’t simply deploying code. This problem will be solved of course; the two podcasts linked below give some clues as to where the solution might come from.