This was fun to write, though it's hard to boil everything down to 10 big steps. I thnk as an industry we tend to forget that there are a LOT of us wearing multiple hats, working solo, just trying to get things done - and while we want to do… Read more

It's funny - sorta - how you become used to the quirks of the tools you. I try not to rant too often here on the blog, but seriously, it's time for TSQL to lose the BEGIN/END syntax. It's clunky syntax that I think adds more bugs than it prevents.… Read more

From time to time, I need to dump out the result from a SP, such as sp_lock or sp_who.

Traditionally, I will use

sp_helptext sp_lock

to get the source code and retrieve the column metadata of the result set, and then build a table based on the retrieve column information,…

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I was having this discussion recently with Shawn Weisfeld, President of ONETUG and it's definitely a frustrating topic. As a former IT manager my team was always pushing to go to a class or a conference to "maintain their skills" but surprisingly few would make time to attend a Code… Read more

CIO Magazine has a interesting article about Douglas Merrill, the CIO of Google. One of the things he dicusses in the article is that if someone can be 10% more efficient by using a Mac, he let's them use the Mac. He goes on to talk about rather than… Read more

I was reading an interview with Jimmy Wales (the Wikipedia guy) in Selling Power magazine (I have ecletic reading preferences I know) and aside from the stuff about Wikipedia he talked a little about moving into search and how he hoped that by leveraging the lessons learned so far he… Read more

After putting it off for six months, I finally took - and passed - 70-431 yesterday. I know, I'm probably one of the last ones on board, but I'm kind of a geek and I don't want to sit for an exam until I'm really ready. I've failed two MS…

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As a follow up to my post about Cesar Cerrudo's new whitepaper, earlier this month David Litchfield talked about putting honeypots in the database in his blog post, Database tripwires..., to catch someone snooping around. The basic idea for non-Oracle databases is to create some sort of alerting…

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Cesar Cerrudo of Argeniss Information Security has put out a new whitepaper (.pdf format), Data0: Next generation malware for stealing databases, describing how malware could be crafted to steal information out of databases. For the most part, it stays at a high-level, however, Cesar does give a few example…

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For the page 10 months or so I've been using a Samsung Blackjack, before that I used various Blackberries for perhaps 5 years. I changed phones because the BB I had didn't offer the ability to tether and working mostly solo it's pretty handy to be be able to connect… Read more

Maybe someone at MS can explain this; they have that nice dialog that comes up after a reboot where you select planned/unplanned, enter a code and a reason. Why don't they auto populate that when a Windows update triggers the reboot without user intervention? A list of the changes applied… Read more

I wrote up some more notes (in addition to what's available here on the blog) to try to raise the awareness level of what might be possible for a SQL Server event. Article is at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/User+Groups/61534/. Read more

I solved an "interesting" issue today. It is about distributed transaction. When I set up transactional replication with immediate updating subscription between two SQL Server 2K5, using

EXEC sp_link_publication @publisher = 'Server1', @publication = 'PubUpdate1',@publisher_db = 'Pub_DB',@security_mode = 0,@login = 'sa',@password = 'sa_pwd'

on Server2, where the updatable subscribtion is…

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I recently wrote an article on owners vs schemas for SQLTeam thinking that I had this all figured out. So now I am studying for 70-431 and ran across an item on broken ownership chains. This is the problem when a view has a different owner than a table or…

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I had dinner with Wes Dumey and Pam Shaw from Tampa last night to share some lessons learned and hear what they had in mind for their implementation. They made the decision to rent space at a hotel, partly out of lack of free venues and partly because the hotel… Read more

Real life events continue to interfere with my regular posting. However, I would rather deal with them and neglect posting than the other way around. My mother-in-law had full knee replacement surgery last week and we've been helping her out. I've been tending to the children and cooking while my…

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I've got a request in to PASS asking them to release 2 of the many sessions that were presented at the most recent Summit to the chapters to be made available for download to their members. Chapters are always looking for content and PASS always needs to market the event,… Read more

Visit the blog of Joe Healy, my favorite MS Developer Evangelist to see some pics from SQLSaturday. Joe is amazingly good at fostering interactions between groups all over Florida and he actually managed to take a few decent photos too! Read more

You may not think of DDJ for database info and I'll admit that what they do cover is often a bit off the path most of us SQL Server people follow, but they do have some interesting content that I like because it does take me past my normal SQL… Read more

I was doing a research on SQL trace regarding RPC:Completed event. So I need to generate a RPC:Completed event first for test, but it seems I cannot(or I do not know how to) do it within SSMS quickly.

So I create a quick VBScript to do this for me:

dim… Read more