A few colleagues of mine, Andy Leonard, Jason Massie, and Chuck Boyce, are all on Twitter. As a matter of fact, Jason blogged on some folks he follows on Twitter with regards to SQL Server. I've also read Scoble talking about Twitter and decided to give it… Read more

I have a CTP of SSRS 2008 deployed to one of my servers. Today I built a couple of reports and from one of my systems, they all tested fine. However, this system, because it is a testing server, doesn't receive the Group Policy Object (GPO) controlling IE security settings… Read more

I have been thinking about getting the MCT credential for about five years.  During the MVP Summit I attended a session titled "So, you want to be an MCT".  They convinced me that this might be a good idea, and I began looking at the requirments. One of the requirments… Read more

Ran across this article about burnout and thought it worth posting. Burnout is not fun to experience and heading it off isn't always easy, especially for those of us in IT. At least take a second and read the symptoms, maybe even if you're fine you'll recognize that someone else… Read more

There is a little quirk with NULLs when using the NOT IN qualifier.  I use the term "quirk" loosely here because the behavior is exactly as intended, though it may not be obvious.  The following query shows a trivial example:

 

At first glance, one might think that we'll see… Read more

Brian Kelley posted Giving a Presentation about a week ago and is worth reading, in particular his suggestion about Toastmasters I like (but have not tried) and the link to a post by Scott Hanselman. Today my friend Steve sent me this link to Tips for Public Speaking that you… Read more

Or maybe part 3, depending.

 Amazon reduced the cost of the Kindle yesterday. It's $40 off, a 10% discount, down to $359 from $399 and that's tempting. I've got some Amazon credits, about $100, and since I could conceivably deduct this as a business expense, review it for the site,… Read more

Last night the Midlands PASS Chapter had the pleasure of hosting SQL Server MVP Brian Knight. I was able to capture a few pictures from last night though they aren't the best quality. 

Our next meeting is scheduled for July 10 and we are hosting John Welch, SQL Server… Read more

Received news today that one of my submitted sessions - Should You Move Into Management - was accepted for the summit. Good news of course, this will be my nineth consecutive year presenting at the summit and it's always fun. Was disappointed to learn that the session I did last… Read more

After being gone for 4 days, I've got a little catching up to do. I try to be prepared before I leave, but I also like to be ahead of the curve, especially with the daily grind of articles, QODs, scripts, and of course, editorials.

 I took my video laptop… Read more

I get a lot of questions about virtualization and really have few answers. At a high level it's not hard to see some opportunities in an enterprise where it makes sense, perhaps the most obvious being hardware consolidation, followed by virtual PC environments for testing. I'm sure there are other valid… Read more

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Speaker: SQL Server MVP Brian Knight

The Midlands PASS chapter will hold a special meeting on Tuesday, May 27, 2008, to host SQL Server MVP Brian Knight. Brian will be giving a presentation on Data Mining using SQL Server. The meeting will once again be… Read more

The dates for Microsoft's TechEd 2008 are fast approaching here in North America. Sandwiched between the two weeks of this year's TechEd is the SQL Saturday Tweener, which will also be held at the Orange County Convention Center. Unfortunately, I'm not headed to TechEd this year, but if I were,… Read more

I'll be doing a presentation for the Steel City SQL Group on June 17 and then on June 18th I'm doing an all day seminar on Performance Tuning at the Embassy Suites in Birmingham. Cost is $129 and that includes a nice lunch. The seminar is really targetted at the… Read more

I read Andrew Binstock occassionally in SD Times and in the most recent issue he posted a list of guidelines (which in turn was excerpted from 'The Thoughtworks Anthology') for learning to write "real" object oriented code. Read Getting the knack of OO Coding and see what you think. Some… Read more

Ran across this strange occurence while doing some testing. To duplicate the results (the actual code was a little more complicated) run this:

select top 1 * from sysdatabases

go 101

And you get:

Batch execution completed 101 times. The query has exceeded the maximum number of result sets that… Read more

SQL Server MVP Frank Kalis has posted a short review on How to Cheat at Securing SQL Server 2005, a book I was able to contribute two chapters to last year. The chapters I focused on were related to Authentication and DDL Triggers. It was a great experience… Read more

This is just a starting point for you to prepare for your interview so make sure not to limit yourself to what you find here. These answers could easily vary but generally someone who is interviewing is looking not only for a correct answer but confidence in your answer. If… Read more

Here are your answers to the questions from last week You should get some variation of what I have given you here. If you think I've made a mistake somewhere let me know and we can discuss it. This will be a short series of blogs on interview questions to… Read more

I have decided to make a short series of blogs about possible interview questions to help you prepare for an interview. Last time I wrote about basic DBA questions. Today I have given you some basic SSIS question to study. These basic SSIS questions will give you a starting point…

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