In my last post, I talked about what prompted me to give a deep thought to documentation work. Documentation, to me, is no small work load esp. when the quality bar is set high.

A DBA usually will get involved in four types of documents as listed below

• System document: This…

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I've been emailing back and forth with IndyTechfest organizer John Magnabosco over the past year as we've traded notes about running community events, so when he invited me to attend as a speaker it seemed like the perfect opportunity to go see first hand how they do things. I've never… Read more

Saw a mention of this in the latest MSDN Magazine, you can download Reflector.SQL2005Browser and install it as an add-in for the well know Reflector tool (both are free). Point it at a server, pick a database, and you can browse through the deployed CLR objects. From there you can… Read more

I'm starting to see results from other people testing compression and it seems that the data compression can really provide some nice benefits. I did minimal testing since I don't have any great, large databases and I'd have to create a load, which I didn't want to do. However some… Read more

I've been swarmed under at work and with migraines. That should change over the weekend (the swarmed under... migraines come and go). So hopefully I'll get more posts up in the coming days.

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Yesterday I posted Building YOUR Brand that described a formula for becoming rich and famous. Well, perhaps richer than you are now anyway. It's fine to have a formula, but in practice there's more to it than having and following the formula. So in that line of thought, I've got… Read more

There has been a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth regarding the scuttlebutt that SP2 will be the last service pack for SQL Server 2005.  I, too, am excited about the release of the next version of SQL Server later this year, but SQL Server 2005 is likely… Read more

Between teaching classes, attending community events, and participating in the local user group I get to have a lot of interesting conversations from a diverse group of people. Diverse in the positive sense. One question I get occasionally is along the lines of 'what can I do to grow my… Read more

Just spoke with Brian this morning to get an event update for SQLSaturday #3:

• 122 attendees registered so far (event is set for May 3rd)
• 20 volunteers
• 26 sessions submitted (call for speakers open through Mar 15, Brian is looking for SQL 2008 content now)

Very good progress so… Read more

Friday I gave another iteration of our free Sucessful Technical Speaking class, upgraded some since the last version, and this was my first time using the Presenter View in 2007. If you haven't seen it yet here is a page about it from MS, but basically it makes it very… Read more

I'll be teaching a one day performance tuning seminar that targets beginning DBA's and developers that do data access, hoping to provide some useful insight into things that they can do immediately to address performance problems. It's on May 2, 2008 in Jacksonville and will serve as the 'pre-conference' event for the… Read more

 Oneof my tasks for our mini-Summit for Red Gate was to show the crew how I do the podcasts. There were fiveof us there and the hope is that at some point 2 or 3 of us can do video, so since I had the most experience, I brought along… Read more

I was mildly amused by my friend Steve Jones blog post Finding a Direction about not really wanting to spend a couple days in meetings. The amusement is in part because I know he's just as contrarian as I am, but really it's because we have an entire generation of… Read more

Mary Jo Foley reports that MS is signing up testers for a hosted SQL Server solution called SQL Server Data Services that is similar to the idea of Amazon Simpledb. Jump to their FAQ for more info. One interesting note is that it offers unlimited storage, but nothing on pricing.… Read more

My friend Shawn Weisfeld is expecting more than 400 attendees at Orlando Code Camp this year. There will be at least six tracks and probably more if Shawn can find the space, and lunch this year is sandwiches courtesy of Publix rather than the same old pizza we've had in… Read more

 I'm not a bg fan of long meetings. I used to try and plan an hour a week staff meeting for my group, and then desparately try to cover everything in 30 minutes, take some questions, and then get everyone out of there. I hated being in 2-3 hour meetings… Read more

If you look at my blog roll Jeff Dunntemann is one of the ones recommend. Nothing about SQL Server there, but he is a technology guy and a thinking one at that. I catch up on reading his stuff from time to time and just yesterday read The Friction is in th… Read more

 SQL Server 2008 brings with is a new set of features involving compression. At first I was assuming this was only backup compression, but as I've been digging in, there is a lot more to it. In fact, there are actually quite a few types of compression. We have: 

• Backup…

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I've read with interest some of Steve's editorials about SQL 2005 SP3 and in large part agree with him that it's hard to believe they are contemplating no additional service packs beyond #2. I think it's easy to react - or over react - to the news mainly because we… Read more

As a DBA, documentation work is unavoidable, we need to do documentation about things we have done, for example, what code we have implemented, what configuration value we have changed, what user rights we have changed, what xxxx. In a heavily-audited environment, documentation practice is what an auditor enthusiasitcally pursues

I once… Read more