The Bit Bucket

When designing a real-time architecture, scalability is one of the most important considerations. Real-time systems must handle both high volume and high velocity, which means designing for continuous data flow rather than occasional spikes.

One of the key strategies for scale is partitioning. Partitioning divides the event stream into multiple independent segments, allowing processing to happen in parallel. This is essential when you have large numbers of events arriving simultaneously — for example, telemetry from thousands of IoT devices or transaction logs from multiple systems. The more effectively you partition your data, the better you can distribute the workload across compute resources.

2026-08-05

There is an endless discussion in the development community about whether databases should include declared foreign key constraints or not.

As a consultant, I regularly visit a wide variety of client sites. Many of these have applications designed without constraints. When I ask why there are no constraints, the response is invariably one of the following:

• We don’t need them because the app ensures that it’s right
• They don’t work well with our application development
• They are too slow
• What’s a foreign key constraint?

Most of the sites that I work with have sizeable databases. This discussion is important in those situations.

2026-08-04

Once Activator is running, you’ll want to monitor how your triggers behave and manage them effectively.

Each time a rule condition is met, Activator generates a trigger event. These can be viewed in the monitoring interface, where you’ll see a history of rule activations, timestamps, and outcomes.

Monitoring this activity helps confirm that your rules are working as intended — and also lets you catch unexpected behavior, such as overly frequent triggers or false positives.

2026-08-03

Even more SQL love !

Another popular SQL dialect is for Google BigQuery. And we’ve just completed our first course using it.

Creating reports, analytics, or applications? And need to get data out of Google BigQuery? Learn to write SQL queries like a pro !

We now have very popular SQL courses, for all the most important SQL dialects. There’s our flagship course for T-SQL, then already courses for PostgreSQL, Snowflake, Oracle, DB2, MySQL, and Azure HorizonDB. We’ve just added our new course Writing SQL Queries for BigQuery and you can enrol in it now. It’s just $95 USD.

2026-08-02

While Activator supports many types of actions, some of the most common and useful ones are notifications — such as sending a message to Microsoft Teams, generating an email, or updating an existing workflow.

These actions help keep people in the loop. Even when automation is in place, there are times when human awareness or approval is still essential. For example, sending an alert to a Teams channel can immediately notify support engineers that something unusual has happened, while still allowing automated responses to continue in parallel.

2026-08-01

I recently received a review copy of The Orange Book of Machine Learning: Green Edition by Carl McBride Ellis from my friends at PackT.

Author

Carl McBride Ellis wrote this book as a Green Edition of the material he had been teaching across a whole range of Spanish cities.

Content

This is the sort of technical book that feels less like a formal textbook and more like spending a few very productive days with an experienced instructor. That makes sense: the book grew out of a five-day course, and its examples are built around Python, pandas, scikit-learn and Jupyter notebooks. The result is practical, opinionated and surprisingly personable. The language is quite precise but a little less conversational than I would have liked. It’s very to the point.

2026-07-31

Logic Apps are closely related to Power Automate, but they’re designed for enterprise IT teams that need more control, scalability, and governance.

Like Power Automate, Logic Apps let you automate workflows across systems using a visual, low-code designer.

However, Logic Apps are built on Azure, which gives them access to more advanced capabilities — such as higher throughput, better integration with on-premises systems, and enterprise-grade reliability.

You can think of Power Automate as being focused on business users and citizen developers, while Logic Apps are aimed at IT professionals and developers who build and maintain enterprise integrations.

2026-07-30

Database mirroring was added way in SQL Server 2005. One of the features added to it later in SQL Server 2008 was auto page repair. When SQL Server 2012 was released, Availability Groups also offered auto page repair.

Just how useful is this feature though ?

I’ll start by saying that it can’t hurt.

When SQL Server is reading a page on the primary replica and receives an unrecoverable I/O error (typically but not always, an error 823 for a checksum error), it will try to repair the page when:

2026-07-29

Power Automate is Microsoft’s no-code workflow automation platform, and it integrates directly with Activator to help turn events into business actions.

When a rule in Activator is met — for example, when a sensor crosses a threshold or a transaction fails multiple times — that event can automatically trigger a Power Automate flow.

A Power Automate flow is a sequence of steps that perform an operation, often involving multiple systems. For example, a trigger from Activator could:

2026-07-28

I work with a lot of SQL Server databases that are poorly normalized. One of my pet dislikes is the column to rule them all.

Here are simple tests:

• If I ask you what’s stored in a column and you can’t tell me a single answer, then you’ve got a problem.
• If you need to refer to another column to work out what’s in the first column, then you’ve got a problem.

Here are some examples:

2026-07-27