If you work at a company with more than a 100 or so employees you probably get an email every couple weeks about a phone or some other item being found in the breakroom/restroom/conference room, often with a note saying to email or call with a description of what you’re… Read more

I shifted to Reader about a year ago mainly for the ability to access my feeds on multiple devices. I’ll admit to being surprised that Google would close it, but given that it was free hard for me to complain. I’ve been looking at the suggestions for a replacement and… Read more

This past weekend we took a mini vacation, along the way my daughter decided to play this song, which is indeed a pretty good song to enjoy on vacation. Blame me if this one gets stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

Read more

It’s not uncommon to get frustrated about something at work and send out an email blasting whatever person or group has caused you the frustration. It rarely ends well. It’s usually not very effective in generating the change, and it doesn’t do much to build your reputation as someone that… Read more

I read quite a bit and it’s rare that I don’t have a book or magazine with me in case I’m stuck waiting on some meeting to start. Most days at lunch I read for a few minutes too, just another way to get to my weekly goal of professional… Read more

Recently at work we had a “Hawaiian Shirt Day”, a nice change from the usual business casual. I picked one of my brightest SQLSaturday shirts and off I went to work, where someone remarked that they couldn’t believe I had a Hawaiian SQL Shirt. I remarked that not only did… Read more

For the past couple months I’ve been looking forward to a 5 week break, a chance to think about what I’ve learned and what I want to do next. I haven’t take 2 weeks in a row off in almost 3 years, so a nice vacation, some thinking, some yard… Read more

As I re-read the original Looking Back post I realized I didn’t include anything about the fear part – stepping away from an established career focus to do something else for a while. I’ve been a SQL guy for a long time, I started using SQL Server in 1998 and… Read more

• Spend a few minutes reviewing 20 Critical Security Controls. Very interesting stuff. For example, #1 refers to having and maintaining an inventory of authorized devices/etc. Do you know all the servers running SQL and would you know if someone set up a new one?
• Add this blog about servant…

Read more

In July 2011 I took what felt like a big chance and a detour to lead a large and complex security upgrade for a large company. The project included replacing firewalls, re-ip’ing  hundreds of servers, implementing updates to hardening standards, updating application logging, and a lot more. A ‘lot more’… Read more

The Way, starring Martin Sheen and directed by Emilio Estevez has been on my want to watch list for a while, kept putting it off because it looked like (and sometimes is) a sad movie. Tom (Martin) gets a call that his son was killed in Europe on the… Read more

I’ll be attending and presenting at SQLSaturday #200 in Philadelphia in June, then I’ll be attending the first ever SQLSaturday in Cocoa Beach in late July, and then I’ll definitely be at SQLSaturday Orlando on September 21st. No plans for April, in May I may drive up to attend SQLSaturday… Read more

• Consider adding Troy Hunt to your feed list
• Great post about the role of staffing firms in your job search and saying no to offers that aren’t good enough
• VoltDB claims to the be the fastest OLTP database – anyone out there tried it?
• I don’t want to work at…

Read more

I can’t say I’ve ever worried too much about how much power my PC uses. I care about battery life on a laptop and like laptops that use a lower wattage transformer because it’s smaller and lighter. Power to servers only mattered as far as “do we have it” and… Read more

I’m not sure what put this phrase in my head, though I think in part it came from various posts by Seth Godin, and it represents something – a doubt maybe – about whether I’m doing enough.

I think of myself as fairly conservative when it comes to taking risks.… Read more

If you’re involved in the database world it’s hard to have missed the rise of the “no-sql” database products, designed to – depending on your view or the product I suppose – make databases simpler, break out of the transaction database paradigm, scale out across hundreds of machines, make it… Read more

I’ve worked in a lot of different offices and office layouts over the years. Looking back I’ve been lucky (or not as you prefer) to not spend much time in a cube, almost always having my own workspace or sharing it with one other person. I’ve helped assemble furniture, move… Read more

I’m writing this because I was thinking about a member of the local PASS chapter on the way home last night, a friend who lost his spouse to illness after a long and happy marriage. I had known about her illness, but only knew that she died because he chose… Read more

I’ll be driving south a few miles tomorrow night to talk to the great group at MagicPASS about the basics of statistics in SQL Server – what they are, how they can help (or hurt) performance, and how to maintain them. I’m looking forward to it, hope to see you… Read more

I was recently talking with a friend about doing some research into a NAS solution for home and that I was trying FreeNAS out in a VM. He asked…why? Why not just buy one? He had one, a model I knew about, and said it was solid storage if maybe… Read more