Locking should be simple, right? You need to access a row or table and you get a lock. Oh yeah, blocking is bad.

It’s not that simple, and I find this is an area that many people do not understand that well. Joe does a nice job of presenting this… Read more

I am excited that I get to speak at SQL Saturday #68 on April 9.  If you live close to Olympia, WA please stop by and visit and join Women in Technology conversation and other SQL topic sessions.  There are many great topics to learn and expand beyond your horizon. Read more

Do you ever find yourself working on different scripts at once?  Maybe you are working on something that tests certain functionality in SQL Server, you have some presentation scripts you are working on, and possibly three or four scripts related to a project at work.  I find myself in a… Read more

Yesterday, I went in for my re-take of the MCM written exam.  If you recall, I failed the exam last time.  I did a great job of failing, in fact, and only received a 522 on the exam.  I didn’t share my score previously because it was a bit… Read more

We’ve seen a few summaries come through by now, so I’m going to throw mine into the mix.  To recap those that I’ve already read, there are:

• Grant Fritchey (Blog | @GFritchey) – Summary
• Jes Schultz Borland (Blog|@grrl_geek) – Summary
• Kelly Martinez (Blog |…

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This topic actually came up at SQL Saturday #70 - Columbia, SC. I spent the first 15 years of my life as a U.S. Marine dependent. Two years later I reported to The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina. I spent four years there and then served four… Read more

This is the most important and essential first step for a DBA on the journey to providing outstanding customer service. Make sure you too are headed in the right direction.

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The below information has been taken from SSWUG.org.

Oracle Drops the Bomb
Since the purchase of Sun and it’s holdings by Oracle corporation there has been much speculation regarding the leverage Oracle now owns in the Server and RDBMS worlds. An March 23rd Oracle has begun flexing that muscle, announcing… Read more

We do a lot of things. It’s difficult to explain all the things we do to people. So I made you a handy chart! Also available in PDF format!

For your convenience, here are the associated links:

MidnightDBA.com

DBAs@Midnight webshow

Groupies

DBA Rant

SQL Awesomesauce

SQL Marklar

More…

ITBookworm.com Read more

Just… Wow. What an event. What a great group of people. I’m just so lucky to be involved with fantastic individuals like these. Thanks for having me out to play everyone, I really appreciated it.

SQL Saturday #67 started for me with my second FreeCon (follow the link for… Read more

A bit of a crazy day for me, starting off a crazy week. I leave this afternoon for SQL Server Connections in Orlando, where it’s in the 80F with some rain. It was about 60F yesterday and sunny in Denver, a beautiful t-shirt… Read more

I just ran into something that I hadn’t noticed in SQL Server.  It struck me as somewhat interesting but is really not too big of a deal.

While demonstrating that the XML plan can be generated when you dump data into a temp table, I happened onto this little ditty.… Read more

It’s been a long time since grade school math, and for some the details have become kinda fuzzy. I’m no [insert name of famous math genius here], but I’ve been able to explain some basic things over the years.  A common SQL Math Misunderstanding came up again recently with a… Read more

Red Gate Software is announcing SQL in the City today, a series of events that will bring a free day of training to a few locations later this year. The events will be free and features specific Red Gate products and solutions to the common problems and situations that many… Read more

TornPage Detection: Up to sql server 2000, for data corruption process is called torn page detection, this option is default on. The data page is of size 8k and  combination of 8 pages is called extent. where as hardware storage is stored in … Continue reading →

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Cross-posted from the Goal Keeping DBA blog:

In the September 2010 issue of Toastmaster magazine there’s a great article by Chris Witt (blog) entitled Not All Ideas Are Created Equal. Here is the gist of what it has to say with my own take on the points… Read more

Your success as a Data Professional is directly dependant to the quality of service you provide your customers. Are you confident you’re doing enough?

Here’s What Not to Do

Recently I had what I can only describe politely as a very poor customer experience.… Read more

Here’s the solution to SQL Server Crossword #3.

I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know if you would like me to see more of these in the future.

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G’day,

I look after several clustered instances of SQL SERVER. One of the tasks that I do every morning is to check if any of those instances have failed over to a new node. I would prefer to have this monitored automatically, and that’s what this post is about –… Read more

This article is the first in a three-part series

On the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) forum for Reporting Services and other online discussion resources, I see many report developers asking how to building analytical reports using relational data sources. Some of the most fundamental capabilities often require complex and convoluted…

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