On the Friday at the end of the Summit we had a 4 hour Board meeting, welcoming new board members Brian Moran and Jeremiah Peschka (and newly elected Tom Larock too). Perhaps out of order, one key thing we discussed was when to have our first in person Board meeting… Read more

SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 introduced several new features.  One key feature was the inclusion of the Gauge Controls.  I was recently asked to provide a real-world example of the Linear Gauge Control.   After doing a little reading and testing of the linear control I chose my path.  I started… Read more

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I have been involved in the SQL Server community since 2000, and during the past nine years I have seen hundreds of volunteers donate large amounts of their time to the community. For example:

• DBAs who answer tens of thousands of questions on SQL Server news groups and forums.
• DBAs…

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It happens, not often, but I do regularly see people talking about their tempdb growing too large. Often that means that people have not properly sized tempdb to me, but there could be legitimate reasons why it’s grown large.

This is one reason that I’d like to see a separate… Read more

It pours.

I come back from 4 days unwired, a bunch of writing done, to a laptop that’s head, a site that won’t take posts, and a ton of email and articles.

At least my external HDD reader is reading the drive. I’m copying stuff off now, but it’s not… Read more

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After playing around with powershell a bit, I managed to do something quite useful.  There are a multitude of ways to capture performance counters but I think this will have the advantage of being able to be fired by SqlAgent (or another timer process) every X many seconds.  All you… Read more

I didn’t have Internet access for 4 days while we were in the mountains. Actually I could have purchased it, but for uploading blogs it didn’t seem like a great idea. Plus I’d be tempted to work if I did that.

So I did some offline blogging, but for the… Read more

Well, it has been a couple of weeks since my last blog post and over a month since Maintaining Security and Performance Using Stored Procedures Part I – Using EXECUTE AS was posted, although I did spend time working on the originally unplanned follow up to that post when I…

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I’m happy to announce that SQL Saturday Dallas is officially scheduled, and the registration and call for speakers is open.  This event will be held on Saturday, May 22, 2010, at the Region 10 Education Service Center in Richardson.

We’ll be accepting session abstracts until the middle of February,… Read more

Well I've taken the plunge. I have finally broken down and decided to dictate blog post, articles, and other documents. Speech recognition has come a long way over the years, and it's time I make use of it. Does that mean I'm getting typing altogether? Not exactly. One of the… Read more

AnandTech IT has an interesting post up that looks at the roadmap for AMD in the server arena for 2010/2011. The gist of it is that AMD may be competitive with Intel in some parts of the market (two-socket servers), which is very good news for the industry. If Intel… Read more

The Midlands of South Carolina will be hosting a Code Camp on January 30, 2009. You can register as an attendee, submit a session, or sign-up to volunteer here:

Columbia Code Camp 2010

The Code Camp is being run by the Columbia Enterprise Developers Guild, our .NET sister guild… Read more

I will be teaching ICT 4461 SQL Server with Lab starting Tuesday, January 5, 2010. This will be an on-campus class, held in the Josephine Computer Lab. The textbook is Beginning SQL Server 2008 for Developers by Robin Dewson. The ten week class is worth four units in the Master’s… Read more

I met Rob via email early this year as a volunteer helping with content for PASS, and I’ve been following his blog since then – always interested to see what people that are willing to volunteer are working on. He’s averaging 2-3 posts a month, and almost all of them… Read more

Ran across this list a while back, Jurgen posted his Top 200 Developer Blogs list and an OPML file of the results. Some I recognize, a lot I don’t, but I’m going to add them all to my reader for a couple months and see which one I want to… Read more

Brian Moran (incoming Board member) did a nice interview with Kevin, worth reading, and some good stuff about areas where PASS could do better. I’m hoping that as he gets through the adjustment of not being on the Board that Kevin will continue to think and comment on areas where… Read more