Sometimes its the little things that seem to take forever! We've had a text only logo up for a while, functional if less than exciting. Getting a logo done was hard because while all of us know a lot about data, none of us seem to have the logo designer… Read more

Picked this up from the local Net group here in Orlando. INETA is actually pretty helpful when it comes to SQL groups. This is definitely a specialized role and not one I'm sure I agree with, but it's hard to argue against their success at least with regards to their… Read more

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After a few meetings of oPASS this year the numbers I use are 2 slices of pizza and 2 drinks per person, plus about 10%. I order the large pizzas and get a mix of crusts and topping - remember to get vegetarian! In our case we also have one… Read more

This went up today and there is one great comment about possibly using snapshot isolation as an alternative to the techiques I described. It's the best part of SSC; reading the article plus the comments really gives you an interesting view of the subject at hand.

The article is at… Read more

I've been following Steve's exploits trying to learn the podcasting business and we usually talk about it once a week or so, just me as a sounding board/podcast skeptic. We were talking yesterday about the podcasts and I had mentioned something about making a note for my blog, and he… Read more

If you subscribe to the Connector (the main communication email from PASS.org) you should have gotten one yesterday that finally linked to the event! Looks like we finally sorted out the lines of communication and every bit of press helps.

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If you do any coding in .Net using aspx pages you'll recognize this one. Each page has a title attribute that defaults to 'untitled page'. Nothing wrong with a default, but I sure wish they wouldn't let those pages compile or would at least flag a warning. All too often… Read more

Had a friend call me recently to ask about how to do this, had an nvarchar(2000) column that needed to be unique values. If you've ever tried this you'll know that SQL will let you do - with a warning! All works fine if your column initially has less than… Read more

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We're at 215 registered with 3 weeks to the big day! This week I'll be having the last planning meeting with our facility host and finalizing the food plans (anyone know how much coffee we need for 200+ attendees?). PASS will be giving us a nice mention in their next… Read more

The most recent ACM Queue Magazine (Vol 5 #6, Sep/Oct 2007) had two really interesting articles. The first was about the ZFS file system and was framed as an interview it with the two inventors, both from Sun. I'd seen it mentioned a few times via blog and took the… Read more

I wrote this article shortly after returning from the PASS 2007 Summit and tried hard to come up with ideas to address what I see as shortcomings within PASS. PASS runs a great conference, but in other areas they just haven't achieved the kind of success that I know is… Read more

All of these are new articles that have gone up on SSC recently. The troubleshooting one was my attempt to get people to think about troubleshooting before it's needed. It's much like debugging; those that are good at it typically get to the resolution much faster than those that tackle… Read more

Bill Graziano (main man at SQLTeam.com, consultant, and VP of PASS) was in town recently to speak at both the Orlando and Jacksonville user groups as a guest of our company, End to End Training. If you attend a user group you know that gettings speakers is tough, and that… Read more

I'm catching up on my reading today and ran across an article from Kathi Kellenberger called Understanding the Difference between Owners and Schemas in SQL Server. Good short overview of the concepts, but one comment really struck me when she said that she thinks of schemas as containers. That's… Read more

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I spent last week onsite with a client teaching performance tuning and it was really a good week. Great company and great people eager to learn. It's always interesting to see what 'aha' moments happen during a class and this one was more interesting than usual because it was half… Read more