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I just got the notification that I will be one of the speakers at the Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta on March 5, 2011 in Denver, Colorado. This event (which is in its third year) is like a mixture of a SQLSaturday and a Code Camp, with tracks devoted to SQL… Read more

It’s looking like it’s going to be a busy year.

It’s only January and I already have three presentations lined up for the first quarter of the year.

• On the 10^th February I’m presenting on database corruption for Quest’s Pain of the Week webcast. I’m not Paul Randal,…

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Sometimes I’m timely in getting the news out on useful resources.  And, other times, I’m a bit slower on the draw.  As I told friends back at New Year’s Day, “As an official member of the Procrastinators Club, welcome to 2008!”  On the other hand, it’s always good to remind… Read more

I’ve been taking a look at MySQL after a long absence to help a client decide if it should be part of their database strategy. It’s always interesting to see the little things that are different, and this one caught my eye, the default in Workbench is to disallow running… Read more

It’s Friday and I’m still taking Friday’s off in my 31 Days of SSIS blog series.  As I mentioned the last two Fridays, I got someone else to write the blog post instead.  I figured people would probably still be showing up, so I though it… Read more

So you don’t have anything to do this Saturday.  Well, if you have an insatiable thirst for SQL knowledge like me, come out to SQL Saturday #57 Houston.    I will be presenting two sessions:

SSIS:  Tuning, Configuring and Deploying

SSRS:  What’s new in R2

This is going to be… Read more

The other day, I was answering a question on the ASK.SQLSERVERCENTRAL.COM forum from a programmer who had hit a problem where he thought that LTRIM and RTRIM had failed to work. Although, I wasn’t entirely certain, I felt sure it was because of the 'Nul' characters that he admitted had… Read more

The invitation for Un-SQL Friday #002 (Tech Giants) was, like, a week ago! I’ve gotta get this train a-rollin, or we won’t ever read all the awesomeness you guys had to say about your techie heroes!  Before we get started, I have to say that I’m VERY pleased with John… Read more

Welcome to day twenty-seventh post of the 31 Days of SSIS.   We’re getting near the end now.  If you haven’t yet, I recommend reading the other posts, they can be found through the introductory post.  This series has been a collection of the things… Read more

Windows and SQL Azure Resources

Cloud computing is more than just the latest buzz word in the IT trade papers.  It is a remarkable paradigm shift with as much potential to “turn over the apple cart” of IT computing as client-server had for the world… Read more

The SQL Lunch and SQL University have combined forces.  Come and watch, laugh, and learn.

#48-SSIS Tips&Tricks (Advanced SSIS)

Speaker: Josef Richberg

Date and Time: 1/28/2011 11:30:00 AM CST

BIO: A SQL practitioner for over 17 years specializing in performance & tuning. I currently… Read more

Kevin discusses resources online that he uses and considers to be excellent destinations for SQL Server professionals. Kevin will discuss each site he uses in detail – check it out!

Posted August 15, 2008.

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I’ve had occasion to watch a lot of people try Profiler, and to hear a lot more about their previous attempts to use it, and they are almost always incredibly frustrated. Why? Simply, the volume of activity combined with the hyper speed scroll just seems overwhelming. People expect tools to…

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I have two tables in an application that I support.  One is called [Report], and the other is [ReportParameter]. 

      --SAMPLE DATA

      DECLARE @Report TABLE (

            ReportID INT PRIMARY KEY,

            Title VARCHAR(30),

            TitleHelp VARCHAR(100),

            ReportName VARCHAR Read more

I was recently looking through my blogging statistics and discovered that I can see the most viewed posts during that time period. I didn’t know that I could do that. I should spend a bit more time exploring the other features of WordPress.

Like all statistics, they can be a… Read more

Welcome to day twenty-sixth post of the 31 Days of SSIS.   We’re getting near the end now.  If you have not read the other posts, they can be found through the introductory post.

This series has been a combination of my thoughts on practices for working with SSIS… Read more

Discretization (one of my favorite tech words to say J) is a really great feature of Analysis Services that is often forgotten.  Basically what discretization does is it can take a dimension attribute and automatically place its members in buckets for you.  For example, if you have a product… Read more

Well, it looks like I half-won the SQLskills competition for a free seat at a SQLskills Master Immersion Event on Internals and Performance in Dallas.

Congrats to the two winners who won a free seat: Sankar Reddy (blog | twitter) and Martin Catherall (blog | twitter) Read more

Not me, though I’m not necessarily against Azure in principle. I had a friend ask me for a SQL Server hosting provider the other day, saying they had built a web front end, and had a web host, but were thinking to separate out some data to a separate provider.… Read more