Hopefully you saw it in the special mailing that went out yesterday, but the marketing team just released a new contest for referring registrations to the 2009 Summit – see all the details here. If you’re able to convince a friend or colleague to go might as well have… Read more

We’re closing in on our October 17th SQLSaturday #21 in Orlando and I thought I’d share a few things about the event this year:

• 54 hour sessions plus 5 five mini (15 min) sessions – our biggest schedule ever
• Fund raising has been much more difficult than in previous years.…

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I'm trying to finish up the last few things here at work before taking the weekend off. I scheduled off the next two days and plan on tiling my bathroom. Tia says it's not really time off, but it's a good project, it's mindless (relatively), I've been wanting to do… Read more

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I was in a presentation last week where the presenter was talking about the ANSI/ISO SQL standards. For the most part the information was correct, but one of the things that was left ambiguous was whether or not the old INNER JOIN syntax was valid (and thus, the audience would be left to assume… Read more

I'm taking the next two days off, heading down into the basement for a four day weekend. Nothing particular going on, just a little stressed with life. Between work here and a busy life with kids, I realized a few weeks ago that I was feeling stressed. So I decided… Read more

I’ve had the glimmer of this idea since I posted about the idea of bringing my chair to the 2009 PASS Summit. I’ve got a few other interests besides SQL Server, and so does everyone else. Probably more than a few of the attendees have a hobby that includes… Read more

Back in August at TechEd Africa I did a TechEd Online interview with Frikkie Bosch. Frikkie’s the marketing manager for the Server products down here in South Africa. We discussed some common mistakes that I’ve seen regarding SQL Server performance. I’m not talking specifics of query/table design here, but rather… Read more

Does it matter if you put your criteria in the ON clause or the WHERE clause?  Well, as with most things SQL the answer is, “It depends”.  If you are dealing with INNER JOIN’s then it really doesn’t matter because the query optimizer is smart enough to come up with… Read more

So you’ve got some packages that regularly extract data to one or more text files, but you know that from time to time some of the queries will not return any data.  However, you find in SSIS that, in a flat file export package, the output file is created regardless… Read more

I’m late announcing this here, but I’m pleased to announce my friend Jack Corbett is joining me in leading oPASS (the Orlando SQL Group). Part of that is Jack being kind enough to pitch in knowing that I’m spread thin, but a bigger part is that he’s been steadily getting… Read more

If you buy from Manning directly today or tomorrow, there’s a 50% discount . Use the code pop0928 at the checkout. Hurry, hurry, hurry….

For those who want a copy and are going to the PASS Summit in November, why not pick up your copy of the book there?… Read more

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If you work in software development or IT long enough eventually you're going to find yourself in a situation where you have to work during off-hours; it's just the nature of the job and can happen for a variety of reasons like: hardware failure, a new client is brought on… Read more

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I’ve been reading through this book and it really does have something for everyone at any level.

I think it is truly awesome that this many people have stepped up and donated not only their time but their knowledge to help http://www.WarChild.org!

I’ll have a more in-depth review later… Read more

Next Meeting - October 6, 2009

 Speaker - SQL Server MVP Brian Kelley

Trigger Happy Database Security

In this presentation we'll look at the use of triggers for added database security. We'll start with the typical DML triggers used to audit changes to data and best and worst practices with… Read more

It's been well-documented through myriad blogs and forum posts about the case sensitivity of the comparisons in the SSIS lookup transformation (a good review can be found here). In a nutshell, a comparison using the lookup transformation is case sensitive when using the default setting of Full Cache, even… Read more