Spikeh'd

I've been doing a lot of database analysis recently, and fortunately I'm one of those people that enjoys it. I'm primarily a .Net developer, but I've spent many years looking after SQL Server databases, helping out (and even educating) DBAs, writing ETL packages and designing both large and complex databases. The database in question was in pretty bad shape; missing, unnecessary, and extremely fragmented indexes, missing primary and foreign keys, bad normalisation, and (the main reason I decided to look into it) undesired table locks during ETL operations. It's a 24/7 system, and live lookups are performed around the clock - data is imported early in the morning (when usage is at a minimum), which is when most of errors occur. Amongst many other pre-emptive actions I've recently performed on the database, I decided to set up regular table index maintenance job to keep queries as quick as possible. Unfortunately the database is SQL Server Standard edition, an...

I spent a considerable amount of time trying to get MVC to work nicely with various file uploaders while I was writing  RustyShark , and I have to admit it's been pretty frustrating at times. On the plus side, it's taught me a lot about how Microsoft MVC works behind the scenes, and allowed me to play with quite a few different uploading tools that're out there. My upload page on RustyShark has quite a complex model - each review is related to multiple Formats (PS3, 360, DVD, Blu Ray etc), each review / format combination can have multiple images associated with it, and each image has additional meta data attached, such as a caption and an upload date. The upload form is created using a combination of Editor Templates, JQuery and AJAX. I will be stripping down any examples to their bare bones to make things a little clearer. This article assumes you are familiar with MVC fundamentals such as creating controllers, views and models within Visual Studio 2010 or later, you ...