Let’s face it, a lot of us don’t enjoy attending meetings and can often find them to be a bit of a struggle. They may even feel like a waste of time and sometimes dare I say it, they actually are!

It doesn’t have to be this way though and… Read more

G’day,

I’m a big fan of maintaining and updating your technical skills, but sometimes its difficult to measure your ability at a task, especially if you don’t use that particular piece of a technology in your day job.

One good way of measuring these skills is to sit certifications and… Read more

Interested in my various performance tuning and troubleshooting videos about SQL Server?  These videos feature my good buddies (and uber-SQL Server experts) Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) and Buck Woody (blog | twitter).  View these insight-packed training videos from our SQL Server training events originally presented… Read more

Here’s another awesome SQL event coming to New York City.  (Keep reading for your discount below!) It’s already getting hot here, so by the time July 14, 2011 rolls around, we’re going need something real cool to do.   It’s not your typical SQL Server intro or even… Read more

Recently I was participating in a round of storage rearranging with a client (aka the storage dance) which consisted of temporarily moving the log files to a different drive and verifying the original drive was empty, then handing it over to the network team to remove that drive, add space… Read more

It’s that time of year again, actually a little earlier than in previous years as we’ll be holding our fifth annual event this year on September, 24, 2011, at Seminole State College in Lake Mary, FL. We’re moving to a new building this year as well, the Partnership Center. It’s… Read more

I love the identity property. I use it in many of my tables, mostly because it gives me a fairly reliable surrogate key that I can use in my tables, especially when testing something. I often do something like this:

CREATE TABLE MyIdentityTest
( id INT IDENTITY(1,

Read more

Security is an important consideration when designing a database application. Who can get access to what data? How much damage can someone do if they get at your data?

In SQL Server 2005 Microsoft implemented column-based encryption, and in SQL Server 2008 they added Transparent Data Encryption. Both solutions work… Read more

The topic came up at work awhile back with using various includes/excludes such as IN, NOT IN, and EXISTS.  A co-worker was working on an ETL process when he discovered that using “NOT IN” in a sub query with a data set that contained NULL values was giving him incorrect… Read more

On June 1st GITCA will run a 24 hour round-the-world virtual event focusing on Cloud Computing. Please visit http://sp.GITCA.org/sites/24Hours for more information. For a complete list of speakers click here. For the complete schedule click here.

We at Geniiius will be presenting two sessions:

Extreme Scaling with SQL… Read more

 

What are the most influential papers in the world of Big Data?  I suggest:

http://bit.ly/BigData1	We face a data management problem: IDC 2010 Digital Unverse Study
http://bit.ly/BigData2	First reference to “Big Data” I found on the web, on Nature 455
http://bit.ly/BigData3	In 2008, “Parallel programming in the…

Read more

There are lots of scenarios in SSIS where you'd want to use a connection within a Script Task.  Unfortunately, the closest help documentation - the comments inside the Script Task itself - give you exceptionally poor advice:
To use the connections collection use something like the following:
ConnectionManager cm =…

Read more

Introduction

We have always been wondering on how to protect/secure our t-sql code written in Stored Procedures and UDF in shared hosting environment from other people who might tweak our work. Here, I would discuss a few options I know to serve purpose.

As per my knowledge, MS SQL Server… Read more

These are five rules for writing from Ernest Hemingway, which I like and recommend for use in your communications. Definitely try to incorporate them into your writing, especially being short and positive.

(Cross posted from The Modern Resume)

Filed under: Blog Tagged: syndicated, writing

Read more

A followup to a post about subqueries with an estimation for how long it would take for the query to run.

In a recent post about subqueries, I compared 4 queries and how they handled 4 million rows of data. The queries involved:

1) Joins with AND conditions.
2)… Read more

It’s Memorial Day, and as usual, I have a blooper reel for the editorial. However I couldn’t fit everything in there, so I’ve pulled out a few more items. Mostly body mistakes or movements and some speaking issues. Enjoy!

The editorial blooper reel is here: http://m.podshow.com/media/15351/episodes/282544/sqlservercentral-282544-05-26-2011.mp4

Filed under: Blog Tagged:…

Read more

I have been compiling a list of what things a person can do to become an expert, or guru, in his chosen field, whether that be in specific fields like SQL Server, BI, .Net, or in a broad field like career advise or data architect.  While we can all argue… Read more

I was looking at performance of a database and I noticed a few of the plans were very large and timing out in the optimizer. This made me wonder, just how many of them were timing out?

This sounds like a job for XQuery!

There’s really nothing to it. Once… Read more

Agile! Scrum! Development methodologies! Sprint!

If you have a manager who reads any web page about being a manager, then you have probably heard about Scrum. Scrum development is very attractive from a manager or stakeholder's point of view. You get short bursts of development and can see results quickly. Read more

Thanks to those who turned out to see my presentation at SqlHerts on Thursday 26thMay.  Its a true pleasure to be able to speak at such events, and I hope the the attendees were all able to takeaway something new from the evening.  I myself learnt that the Style Bar… Read more