Gunther Lenz

A common complaint of database administrators (DBAs) is that performance bottlenecks are not among those problems that one can fix "by just throwing hardware at it." Thus, database servers must provide tools and techniques to help administrators address this issue. On that aspect, SQL Server 2005 does not disappoint. However, one missing element among the performance tuning services of the new SQL Server is the ability to analyze large amounts of code to detect possible inefficiencies without executing the code. We will discuss an add-on, Code Inspector for SQL, which is a static analysis tool for T-SQL being developed at Siemens Corporate Research. It is intended to help DBAs and developers optimize database performance. SQL Server 2005 and Performance Tuning Better Index Wizard The old Index Selection Wizard tool has been replaced by a new and improved tool called... (more)

Software Factories - Part 1

There is a lot of commotion and hope around Software Factories in the community today, which was originally sparked by the Software Factories book of Jack Greenfield and Keith Short. The promise is that Software Factories will streamline and automate software development to become more efficient and produce higher quality software. However, at the same time there is a lot of confusion about what Software Factories really are and how to implement them. In the first part of our Software Factory series we start with working out the problems we face in software development today, wh... (more)

Software Factories - Part II

In Part II of our Software Factories article series we want to highlight how the theory, which we introduced in the first part, translates into practice. One of the things we found out while working with Software Factories is that people quickly get a better understanding just by seeing what a factory can look like. So, now we'll walk you through examples of deliverables for a Software Factory case study. Detailed examples of these deliverables are also discussed in our book Practical Software Factories in .NET, which gives a complete Software Factory case study. Figure 1 is an ... (more)