I first saw this on funsec security discussion list: 

  Dwarves zipped in suitcases steal from Swedes

The gist of the story is it appears gangs are putting dwarves in luggage on long-distance coaches. The dwarves are then able to roam the baggage holds and steal at will. 

What does… Read more

Here's a post from the Windows Server Performance Team:

   An Overview of Troubleshooting Memory Issues

The post discusses the following issues:

• Physical RAM shortage
• Memory leak situations
• Poor pagefile performance

There are performance counters given to be monitored, as well as a discussion as to what they mean and… Read more

 I saw this in my blog reader today:

You can pre-order the Kalen Delaney SQL Server Internals Course - Lesson 1 DVD right now!

The pre-order price is extremely affordable (as is the regular price):

 Pre-Order Price: $19.95 + Shipping
 Regular Price: $29.95 + Shipping

 Shipping:$2.98 US / $12.29… Read more

Saw System Sessions posted on the PSS blog and it shows an example of information being written to the error log as 'spid5s', where the trailing 's' indicates a system session (spid). You can also filter them out of the processes by doing this:

select * from sysprocesses where spid… Read more

One way to find the rows from one table that don't match another table is to use a sub-query. Here is an example:

--create and populate tables
create table table1(col1 int null)
create table table2(col1 int null)

insert into table1(col1)
select 1
UNION select 2
UNION select 3

insert into table2(col1) Read more

This weekend, I had the unique opportunity to donate some time to a worthwhile charity organization. Through the efforts of the Dallas-area .NET user group community (and specifically, Toi Wright), Microsoft, BravoTech and a number of other vendors, the first annual We Are Microsoft Charity Challenge was born in a… Read more

It's Martin Luther King, Jr. day here in the US where we remember the famous civil rights leader. So my kids are home from school, which always makes for an interesting workday. Since I need to get a few podcasts and editorials polished, shot, and edited, this might be a… Read more

First time I've noticed this being offered, saw it posted on the Orlando .Net Users Group (ONETUG) site. Sign up is easy enough, just one page to register and they also offer a digital edition for those who prefer paperless. Register for your subscription, they've had some good LINQ… Read more

I was chatting with a friend recently and in the course of 'what are you up to lately' I mentioned I had been doing some reading about how to blog, which resulted in the raised eyebrow and 'how hard can be blogging be' look. You just set up a blog… Read more

There's always been some confusion about models in Reporting Services, many people ignore them thinking that they are only for use by Report Builder. Models can also be used by BI Design Studio and should be used for all the same reasons that make it useful in RB - it… Read more

Saw it mentioned in the recent MSPress newsletter, Peter DeBetta is writing Introducing SQL Server 2008 and right now Chapter 1 on the Declaritive Management Framework (essentially Group Policy for SQL Server) is a free download. If you sign up you'll get the entire e-book when it's completed. Can't beat free! Read more

Michael Coles had an interesting post about a job interview a friend went on. The person answered questions correctly, but the interviewer told him he (or she) was wrong.

It's a good situation to think about and it's probably one I'll editorialize about at some point. And it's something that's… Read more

My first MVP chat was today, a monthly hour long session where we have a Microsoft representative and we all call in to chat about whatever. I'm not completely sure what we're supposed to be doing as we went through a few bugs, things we hear about in the community,… Read more

Scott Guthrie posted the announcement on his blog today. It's a 'read only' license with a few other limitations, but in general this is a great thing for .Net developers. Sometimes you're just curious, sometimes it's really important to see what goes on at the deepest levels. It really makes… Read more

Partitioning Part 4 concludes the series with a look at 'real' partitioning in SQL 2005 Enterprise Edition. Overall the series worked out reasonably well, accomplished my goal of introducing the technology and options without getting into dense technical detail. There is definitely more to explore in partioning than I've covered! Read more

 Saw both of these on ComputerWorld:

   Oracle buying BEA

   Sun buying MySQL 

It'll be interesting to see how this changes the landscape.

  Read more

Just posted on Jonathan Schartz's blog. They've definitely been playing more in the open source arena, now they've got a reasonably good database product. Read more

I'll be attending the South Florida Code Camp on Feb 2 and also SQLSaturday Tampa on Feb 16th. For both of those I'll be doing my 'Introduction to Transactional Replication' presentation, the same one I did at PASS 2007. Call for speakers for the Orlando Code Camp has not yet… Read more

Last week, in our production, we noticed some records are missing in the subscriber side while existing on the publisher side. The detailed issue description can be found at:

http://www.mydatabasesupport.com/forums/ms-sqlserver/362107-replicated-commands-not-executed-subscriber-side.html

MS online support suggests to apply the latest hotfix and then check again. I can understand online support's practice but… Read more

 I watch the Geekbrief update a few times a week, partially to see new gadgets and partially to see how they do the filmmaking. I haven't incorporated their stuff, but it's interesting to see how they do things. They're more Mac focused in some ways and so they went to… Read more