Magenic Company Blog

Whenever the discussion of “size” comes up, it’s easy to start cracking wise and dropping euphemisms and one-liners (Heck, this opening sentence alone is like setting a ball on the tee for wise guys…like me). So let’s not shy away. Let’s take a look the topic of mobile device screen through the “That’s what she said!” lens.

With the abundance of talk centered on Gamification and the metrics that it can bring to an enterprise solution, it is no wonder that Microsoft has introduced a Gamification plugin for Visual Studio. What makes this interesting to me is the leveraging of the Microsoft LIVE account, so that achievements can be tracked and shared as claims in a claims-based authorization/authentication...

Keeping up with the latest software trends is always a challenge. The pace at which things come (and sometimes go) in the software industry can boggle the mind. Not everybody has the luxury of studying the ins and outs of every shiny technology that passes by. Most developers have their comfort zone and they tend to stay in it. However, good developers also pay at least some attention to new technologies, new techniques, and new trends...

Now that the first quarter of 2012 is just about over, and spring is in the air, there’s no better time to take advantage of Magenic’s incredible thought leaders. Take a look at just some of the great things they have been up to lately and what they have in store.

We are coming up to the end of “Launch Month” for SQL Server 2012. On March 7, Launch Day, I published the first five reasons I was excited. In honor of the local SQL Launch in Minneapolis, I thought I would add to the list. So, in no particular order here are five more reasons I am excited about SQL Server 2012 that should excite you as well.

Some of our clients partner with Magenic to build add-ins for Office using the Visual Studio Tools for Office technology. Visual Studio Tools for Office, commonly known as VSTO, is a set of development tools available in the form of a Visual Studio template-based add-in and a runtime that allows Microsoft Office 2003 and later versions of Office applications to host the .NET Framework Common Language Runtime (CLR) to expose their functionality via the .NET type system.

With thundering applause, SQL Server 2012 is released to manufacturing! OK, it may not have been that exciting for most but for SQL Server professionals, a new release event is always an exciting and critical step in the evolution of SQL Server. With each release of SQL Server, we’ve seen great advancements in what is offered as an overall complete and powerful database engine and feature set.

Today I would like to talk about columnstore indexing one of the many new features that stand out in latest release of SQL Server 2012. Columnstore indexes are primarily designed for use in dimensional data warehouses and data marts and are optimized to improve query performance from a star or similar join in some cases boosting execution times up to 100 times faster than a traditional row based index.

After the SSDT product shipped, I spent some time converting an existing project ( dbproj / Data Dude based project) to SSDT. Actually, I decided not to convert the project, even though I was prompted to do so. Instead, I decided to re-import the SQL 2012 database. My reason to do so was the fact that the old project was breaking down each table into multiple files, one per object.

As promised, we’re kicking off our blog series showcasing some of the great open source work being done by Magenic consultants. Jeff Ferguson, a principal consultant, will be the focus of this initial post. He has an awesome project he created called Gepsio.