This was fun to write, though it's hard to boil everything down to 10 big steps. I thnk as an industry we tend to forget that there are a LOT of us wearing multiple hats, working solo, just trying to get things done - and while we want to do… Read more

It's funny - sorta - how you become used to the quirks of the tools you. I try not to rant too often here on the blog, but seriously, it's time for TSQL to lose the BEGIN/END syntax. It's clunky syntax that I think adds more bugs than it prevents.… Read more

I was having this discussion recently with Shawn Weisfeld, President of ONETUG and it's definitely a frustrating topic. As a former IT manager my team was always pushing to go to a class or a conference to "maintain their skills" but surprisingly few would make time to attend a Code… Read more

CIO Magazine has a interesting article about Douglas Merrill, the CIO of Google. One of the things he dicusses in the article is that if someone can be 10% more efficient by using a Mac, he let's them use the Mac. He goes on to talk about rather than… Read more

I was reading an interview with Jimmy Wales (the Wikipedia guy) in Selling Power magazine (I have ecletic reading preferences I know) and aside from the stuff about Wikipedia he talked a little about moving into search and how he hoped that by leveraging the lessons learned so far he… Read more

For the page 10 months or so I've been using a Samsung Blackjack, before that I used various Blackberries for perhaps 5 years. I changed phones because the BB I had didn't offer the ability to tether and working mostly solo it's pretty handy to be be able to connect… Read more

Maybe someone at MS can explain this; they have that nice dialog that comes up after a reboot where you select planned/unplanned, enter a code and a reason. Why don't they auto populate that when a Windows update triggers the reboot without user intervention? A list of the changes applied… Read more

I wrote up some more notes (in addition to what's available here on the blog) to try to raise the awareness level of what might be possible for a SQL Server event. Article is at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/User+Groups/61534/. Read more

I had dinner with Wes Dumey and Pam Shaw from Tampa last night to share some lessons learned and hear what they had in mind for their implementation. They made the decision to rent space at a hotel, partly out of lack of free venues and partly because the hotel… Read more

I've got a request in to PASS asking them to release 2 of the many sessions that were presented at the most recent Summit to the chapters to be made available for download to their members. Chapters are always looking for content and PASS always needs to market the event,… Read more

Visit the blog of Joe Healy, my favorite MS Developer Evangelist to see some pics from SQLSaturday. Joe is amazingly good at fostering interactions between groups all over Florida and he actually managed to take a few decent photos too! Read more

You may not think of DDJ for database info and I'll admit that what they do cover is often a bit off the path most of us SQL Server people follow, but they do have some interesting content that I like because it does take me past my normal SQL… Read more

A short article but interesting I think, with some good comments already. I think in general triggers are under used, except in the cases where they are abused of course. Here's the article: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/T-SQL/61483/ Read more

We were lucky enough to have Joe come to Orlando to speak at SQLSaturday and we also talked him into doing a one day seminar about all things SQL. If you've read his books you know he sat on the SQL ANSI committee for a while and that he is… Read more

I'm just finishing up sending out thank you emails to the volunteers, speakers, and sponsors that helped make our first SQLSaturday a great success. We ended up with 217 attendees. The event really went well, we had no major problems and surprisingly few minor problems. We did overestimate on soda… Read more

One of the things I discuss in my Successful Technical Speaking class (it's a free class, usually once a quarter) is to take the results of the attendee evaluations with at least one grain of salt. I've come to pay less attention to the overall scores (assuming I didn't totally… Read more

We (End to End Training) will be hosting our Celko on SQL seminar tomorrow (Nov 9th). It's not too late to register and we will be able to accept a limited number of walk ins. If you're near Orlando it would be a shame not to see Celko live!

Registration…

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I happened to get an email asking me to vote for a product that was being featured in one of those reader/user vote contest/award things, and what caught my eye was a bit about what they were doing to prevent fraud. Here are the rules:

• Only one vote per…

I was just reading the October 2007 issue and they have done what magazines are apt to do; redesign themselves to take a fresher approach. Cynically I'm not sure this is anything except billable time for the graphics and layout team, but this time it does look like they are… Read more

Another note from a friend. They decided to upgrade a large varchar column to varchar(max) and subsequently found strange behavior in things that used to work. It would only render to an web page if they did an explicit cast to varchar(some size) and without that if you tested the… Read more