Data-Tales

This is the second tale in a series of stories about data. I hope you enjoy the series.

I was recently at a customer site where the developers were very concerned about the impact of adding columns to a table. They told me that when they added a new column that their deployment code was timing out and the database was massively increasing in size.

The table had increased from around a small size to well over 50GB during the single operation. The deployment operation involved adding the column and writing one row to a deployment history table. Because they were only writing a single new row, they were blaming SQL Server for bloating the database size when a column was added.

2025-09-03

This is the first tale in a series of stories about data. I hope you enjoy the series.

I have a number of clients that I spend a day or two with each month. I like this style of engagement as I get to know the staff and their systems over a period of time, can see the improvements that we make over time. The staff members also know that if they have issues that aren’t desperate, they can save them up for the days that I am onsite. When I arrived at one of these customer sites recently, several of the staff members had grins on their faces, and one told me that Terry (well let’s call him Terry anyway) had really broken something.

2025-08-30