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I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at IT/Dev Connections on October 11th 2016 in Las Vegas! I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am to be able to speak at this conference! I look forward to seeing you there!

Here’s the information on the… Read more

Returning to the post about Making SQSaturday Sustainable (see also a follow post  about addressing concerns) it mentioned two topics that I wanted to look at more; the ROI for PASS and the decrease in funding to events.

For the past few years the standard has been for PASS… Read more

In a post titled The Future of the BA Community PASS announced that there would be no Business Analytics conference in 2017 and that the new strategy would be multi pronged, focused on local groups and events. I’ve never been a fan of the concept of the BAC so it… Read more

Overview:

The entire idea behind a backup, is to protect any organization from the data loss and corruption. However, the question arises what happen if user will loose the backup. Many times we still hear about businesses breaking down due to data loss. In this article we will discuss the… Read more

This year’s involvement in VMware‘s VMworld conference is up on the content catalog! I am extremely proud to announce my participation in the inaugural SQL Server workshop at this year’s VMworld US on August 27th. If your SQL Servers are running in a VMware environment, this course is… Read more

Why I like SQL Sentry Plan Explorer. I am going to be honest here, before attending SQLSKILLS Immersion training I never really thought about using SQL Sentry Plan Explorer before, but once I saw the demos I knew from that … Continue reading →

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Continuation from the previous 85 parts, the whole series can be found at http://www.nikoport.com/columnstore/

With the release of SQL Server 2016, a great number of new functionalities with specific internal structures and own behaviours were created (Columnstore Indexes – part 60 (“3 More Batch Mode Improvements in SQL Server… Read more

A bit of history

Long ago there were such things called diverters. The phone company used them so employees could dial a number and get a second dial tone; this way when dialing long distance the charges would be billed back to the company and not the employee.

I recall… Read more

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

This actually comes from Itzik Ben-Gan, by way of Kevin Feasel.  Kevin’s post is about CROSS APPLY, which is something I need to play with more… Read more

My friend and coworker Melissa Coates (aka @sqlchick) messaged me the other day to see if I could help with a DAX formula. She had a Power BI dashboard in which she needed a very particular interaction to occur. She had slicers for geographic attributes such as Region and… Read more

I’ll be giving a webinar on the new features of Integration Services 2016.

When? August 11, 2016
Where? On the MSSQLTips.com website. You can register here.
Abstract:

SQL Server Integration Services is Microsoft’s leading data integration and transformation tool. In this webcast, we will take a look at which…

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Last week PASS published some new guidance for SQLSaturday that sets a 600 mile rule (has since been updated, still keeps the radius) to keep events from being held too close together and another that reduces the funding from PASS for most events. I appreciate the stated goals, find… Read more

Sharpen Something

It has now been 30 months since the last time I hosted a TSQL Tuesday, that was TSQL Tuesday 51. I recapped that event here with the original invite here. I can’t believe it has been that long since I last hosted. It only seems like yesterday. Read more

UPDATE November 2016 – With SQL Server 2016 SP1, Microsoft will include key enterprise-class features in every edition of SQL Server 2016. This includes TDE! So lets have a recap. What is it? Quite simply – ENCRYPTION at rest; your data … Continue reading →

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I recently collaborated with Idera to produce a short whitepaper on the top 5 things to audit in SQL Server (database engine). You can grab it for free here (registration required):

Whitepaper: Top 5 Items to Audit in SQL Server

None of this is earth shattering. The whitepaper contains the… Read more

I frequently need to know where backups went and I restore those backups for operational recovery on a regular basis. Would you believe in 20+ years as a DBA I can count the number of database restores for a disaster on my fingers? (Which is good because taking off your… Read more

This week SQL Server 2016 Cumulative Update 1 was released and it contains a lot of updates/fixes for SSIS, SSAS, SSRS and MDS. If you are already working on SQL Server 2016, I’d urge to install this update as soon as possible.

Anyway, one of the particular updates that caught… Read more

SQL Server 2016 CU1 has been released and one thing I noticed was: –

FIX: Canceling a backup task crashes SQL Server 2014 or 2016

That’s pretty nasty, when I originally clicked on the link I was expecting to see detailed a pretty precise set of circumstances in which that… Read more

This is the last course of my July training month. This is my second course this week. Yesterday I was teaching a 1-day course Writing SQL Queries. That went very well. You can read all about how that day went here.

For the rest of this week I…

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