I do more than just SQL Server. I enjoy programming. In my former life I have worked with C/C++ and Assembler. I also spent quite a bit of time in Visual Basic. I loved it for prototyping and what we now call RAD development efforts.

As I spent more and… Read more

It doesn’t happen often but every once in a while you may be the lucky person to find a previously unknown bug in SQL Server.

It was a normal morning for me, checking the status of our servers going over any failure messages waiting for the day to ramp up.… Read more

Whenever I do a security presentation, I make sure to cover the Principle of Least Privilege. And when I do I boil it down to this very simple definition:

Giving the rights to do the job. No more. No less.

If you don't give enough rights, the person can't do… Read more

My company has taken the plunge and we have two of the Duo 640’s coming. As soon as they get here we will start a full test pass and I’ll post up the numbers here.

Wes Read more

I was scanning blogs the other day, and noticed Tom LaRock's new image on Twitter. He's SQLRockstar after a little complaining from a large company about SQLBatman. I like the new persona and redesign of the site.

In any case, Grant Fritchey AKA The Scary DBA, noted that he… Read more

An interesting problem develops when the standard default collation for SQL Server isn't appropriate. Working with clients here in the Czech Republic, I have to reset our lab systems server default collation to Czech_CI_AS, and I found it difficult to find out how to do this via Books Online. Since… Read more

I saw recently that Brent Ozar wrote a blog about justifying the cost of attending the 2009 PASS Summit. I tend to agree with the reasons that Brent listed and think he presented a good case, but I thought I should give a few thoughts from my perspective. PASS… Read more

I bought Real Leaders Don't Do Powerpoint by Christoper Witt ($15 at Amazon) on a trip, Powerpoint catching my eye and then deciding it was something I needed to read. It's not anti-Powerpoint, it's more about passion and messaging, something I've come to appreciate in both business and politics. For… Read more

I just finished reading Success Is A Choice: Ten Steps to Overachieving in Business and Life.  Written by Rick Pitino, a highly successful collegiate and professional basketball coach, this book was a good read in that it was well organized, eloquent, and included many stories from the author's own… Read more

On a couple of recent webcasts, I pointed out the folks were running with the local Administrator account. To start this out, I'm not a big fan of security by obfuscation. Security by obfuscation (not code obfuscation, but security by obscurity, if you prefer, I'm using the terms obfuscation/obscurity interchangeably in… Read more

If you are involved data warehousing, or even if you are just a beginner, you may want to check out this article on “Best Practices for Data Warehousing with SQL Server 2008 from the Microsoft MSDN website.

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If you're like me, you've probably typed in LTRIM(RTRIM([value])) hundreds, if not thousands, of times during your travels through SQL Server.  I've long wondered why there was no integrated function that would serve this purpose.

Pinal Dave (@pinaldave) has submitted an item on Microsoft Connect to suggest the… Read more

I noted recently that I purchased a new desktop with the intention of moving to Windows 2008 and Hyper-V. That arrived, and I've been working on setting it up.

It's been great and got me wondering if I could do the same thing on my laptop? After all, I bought… Read more

One of the labs I frequently do with students is to design a database for a training business, something which I know something about and can add some challenges as the lab progresses. Students tend to either under or over normalize, though of course that's all in your point of… Read more

The goal of this post is to explain how to take advantage of Auto-Retry and why you will want to use it. I hope to clarify in which circumstances an auto-retry works best and when not to use it also. The (disclaimer!) point is that every job has its own… Read more

 I was playing around with the endpoint catalog views this afternoon just looking at ways to do poor man's configuration collection on SQL Server and the options avaliable. The endpoints naturally represent the way in to SQL Server and since TCP is the default network protocol for SQL Server 2005… Read more

Tomorrow night, May 28th, I'll be speaking the Augusta Developer's Guild. This is a make-up from earlier in the year when I got sick. Feeling just fine and looking forward to talking about SQL Server and security. If you're in the area, please come on by. I'd love to meet… Read more

I have a new machine, albeit one with a bad video card, running Windows 2008 Server R2 with Hyper-V. My plan was to use this as my workstation and run Hyper-V for various things, SQL Server, Visual Studio, as a browsing desktop, etc.

I wrote recently about finding a few… Read more

I'm flying up Friday afternoon to participate in SQLSaturday #7 which is being led by John Baldwin and his team of volunteers. I visited the user group there about a year ago and while there we discussed the possibility of a SQLSaturday - it's nice to see a seed planted… Read more

A lot of people have asked what happened over the Memorial Day weekend as SQLServerCentral was down. All I can say is Twitter is cool. It didn't save the day, but it helped me.

When I got up Monday morning, Memorial Day, things on the site were slow, but I… Read more