Enthusiasts Convene To Say No To SQL

Given the amount of time it seems I spend working on data access related code I’d be very interested in what solutions the community is coming up with as an alternative.
Enthusiasts Convene To Say No To SQL, Hash Out New DB Breed
via Slashdot Technology Story | Enthusiasts Convene To Say No To SQL, Hash Out [...]

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Entity Framework 2.0 er… 4.0 (.NET Rocks!)

Just finished another excellent podcast from .NET Rocks which this time discussed the new features of the Entity Framework which is currently out in beta. While I haven’t had a chance to give it a try myself I’m very interested in what Daniel Simmons described. Having written off the EF as “not ready yet” and [...]

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Sequential GUID’s – 50% Performance Difference?

While listening to another .NET Rocks podcast this morning I caught mention of Sequential GUID’s, a feature introduced in Sql Server 2005. Given the use of GUID’s as primary keys I thought this a useful piece of information.
What are the performance improvement of Sequential Guid over standard Guid? – Stack Overflow.

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Sybase working to improve NHibernate support | Elegant Code

NHibernate keeps looking more and more like the enterprise .NET solution to choose…
But support in NHibernate for Sybase is not great. The basics work but some of the more advanced features are not implemented at all or are done poorly. Fortunately we have an excellent relationship with our vendor and have had for many years. [...]

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VSTS: DB Best Practices : Right sizing the master.dbschema file for better design time performance

A reference to the master.dbschema (or similar, see below!) is necessary for database projects in Visual Studio that reference system objects. Here’s how to add those objects without slowing everything down.
In the March edition of MSDN we provided an overview of Server Projects and how to reference the master.dbschema file to resolve references to system [...]

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Configuring the Windows Firewall to Allow SQL Server Access

I spent an embarrassingly long period of time trouble-shooting my Sql Server install only to find the problem was the Windows Firewall.
Firewall systems help prevent unauthorized access to computer resources. If a firewall is turned on but not correctly configured, attempts to connect to SQL Server might be blocked.
To access an instance of the SQL [...]

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Unit Tests and Stored Procedures

Despite my continued doubts about stored procedures and practical limits on their best practices usage, there’s no reason to forget all the other lessons I’ve learned about software just because I’m using them. Enter DbUnit, a database testing framework.
DbUnit is a JUnit extension (also usable with Ant) targeted at database-driven projects that, among other things, [...]

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