Author Archives: Brian Lowry

The lack of non-clustered indexes and performance In my consulting experience, one of the most frequently overlooked performance issues I see with web applications is the lack of properly-constructed database indexes. Microsoft’s Entity Framework has helped alleviate some of these issues by automatically creating indexes on foreign key constraints – a necessity for domain models […]

*Attention: there is no migration path from 32-bit to 64-bit, so if you’d like to upgrade your server during this process to 64-bit, then you should skip this and just launch a new 64-bit instance directly into your VPC. You will need to rebuild the server from scratch. Create an image of your EC2 instance […]

Programmatic non-clustered indexes I recently finished building an EntityFrameworkDatabaseBuilder that uses LINQ-style code to allow you to setup non-clustered indexes on a Sql Server instance through an Entity Framework database intializer. The calling code looks like this: This code will create two indexes. The first will be a dual-column, non-clustered index using EmailAddress and Password, […]

Object initializer time vampire The release of C# 3.0 brought the syntactic sugar of object initializers. I realize that this is dated and has been available for a long time; however, I continue to see bad patterns throughout my consulting career that make working with code difficult. This feature can cause nightmares for other developers […]

It has been a few years since I have written about development and technology; I hope to start writing more frequently in the near future. I just need to clear out some of these projects first…