Spikeh'd

Since the start of my career I've used SQL Management Studio (or Query Analyser in MSSQL 2000) to manually create my MSSQL database objects via code. This is a practice I have vehemently defended a number of times - being told that producing objects with the UI tools is "quicker" and "easier". Subjectively, I have to agree with this statement - any kind of well designed UI generation tool is almost certainly going to be quicker than writing a load of CREATE statements by hand... there is of course, a caveat. I tend to find that developers who do not fully understand RDBMS' (which is a vast majority, unfortunately), or do not enjoy writing databases always take the quick and easy approach. The problem with allowing a UI to generate code is that a large portion of it is unnecessary, and it's sometimes difficult to read. This is true of most generator engines, including those found in .Net. In terms of SQL generation, hopefully these code snippets will ...

I recently bought a new NAS (Network Attached Storage) to deal with some of my remote work requirements. Initially I was going to build a server to do the job from spare parts, but I was concerned about power consumption and of course the amount of time it would take to build, configure and administrate. In the end, I had a little look at a few reviews and I decided on the QNAP 219P+. I can honestly say without a doubt that it's one of the best pieces of kit I've bought for a while. It's very feature rich, (almost) everything seems to work perfectly, the interface is well organised and easy to use, and maybe the most important part - it's fast . I'm having a few issues getting the WebDAV service accepting connections, though I think it's Windows' fault, not the QNAP. It's a little on the pricey side for home users, but I didn't mind paying what I did considering how good it is. One of the things I wanted to do was secure my remote communication w...