MS Word 2007 (and probably earlier versions) have the ability to do a basic document compare, useful if you're at a location that doesn't have more advanced comparison tools for TSQL. Just load your scripts into separate Word documents, click on the View ribbon, then click on View Side by… Read more

Recently I had the chance to help a student debug a problem on a production server. It appeared to be failing because duplicate uniqueidentifiers were being created. Thinking that unlikely because the G in GUID stands for global, we dug in but found the code painfully hard to follow due… Read more

Recently I was visiting with an old acquaintance and one of the topics that came up was volunteers. At some point in the past I had said something about volunteers that subsequently proved true (hey, I am right sometimes!) and based on that, he was crowning me the know-all person… Read more

Call for speakers is open for SQLSaturday #5 in Olympia, WA on Oct 10 (note that the MS BI conference is in Seattle earlier that week if you're going you might consider staying over a day or two) and for SQLSaturday #6 in Cleveland on Aug 9th. First time events… Read more

My friend Wes Dumey does a lot of work in the business intelligence sector as a contract employee and has a post worth reading called The Great Debate - Employee vs. Consulting. I don't agree with all of his points, but it's an interesting conversation to have. I do… Read more

Had missed the announcement, came up in conversation yesterday with a friend, the BI conference will be Oct 6-8 in Seattle, registration is $995 if you register by Aug 8. Not planning to attend, so far I'm still firmly rooted on the conventional DBA side of things. Read more

Spent last Tues/Wed in Birmingham, speaking at the user group Tuesday night and then presenting a seminar on Wed. Attendance at the user group was good, about 18, and had really nice participation as I did my standard presentation on transactional replication. They've only been back in business since about… Read more

It's a couple weeks old, but there was a mild blog roar over some comments from Microsoft about wanting to be translucent rather than transparent. I think their reasoning is sound; no company should want or need to disclose the smallest detail about their business, their plans, internal arguments, or… Read more

Earlier in the week I posted a quick & positive note about the event, today I'll add some notes about things that could have gone better. Finding places for improvement doesn't detract all from the value delivered to attendees or the efforts of the volunteer speakers!

• We went with a…

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Needed to kill a connection so I get could logged on recently to a server and didn't have the server tools loaded, ran across this useful link on How to Kill Terminal Services Connection. Might come in handy for you some day. It's hosted on HacksZine.com, similar to the MakeZine.com Read more

I participated in a lunch meeting recently with a number of people from MS that work on their community efforts, and I thought one of their questions was interesting, if obvious; what do you get out of participating in the community as a speaker or group leader?

I think it… Read more

One of the questions that came up during a panel discussion at SQLSaturday #4 was whether it was better to have one trigger or many. It's a Zen question, no real right answer as far as I'm concerned. In practice having 7 update triggers is probably not a good idea,… Read more

I visited the Space Coast group last night, hosted by Ken Tucker, and did about 90 minute of SQL Q&A with a nice group of developers who were all interested in data access (perhaps those not interested didn't attend!). We talked about partitioning, indexing, concurrency, blocking, deadlocks, stored procedure… Read more

Long time acquaintance Allen White is hosting SQLSaturday #6 in Cleveland on August 9th. Registration and call for speakers is open, and once he gets back from Tech Ed will start to communicate with sponsors too. One note on the registration; if you're registering just to see what is going… Read more

At the recent SQLSaturday #4 we had a session end up finishing much earlier than expected, so we gave the attendees the option of moving to other sessions or staying for a Q&A session done with a panel up front. I've only done the panel format a couple times and… Read more

Just received this from my friend John Magnabosco about the SQL portion of the event:

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It's a rite of passage in our business that we have to learn the RAID levels, and I still enjoy the arguments about RAID-5 vs RAID-10, and it seems we still have to keep having the conversation about spindles vs space. But the world is changing with SAN's becoming very… Read more

Attendance on Saturday about 450 across the communities (SQL, .Net, DNN, etc). Not as big as we'd hoped, but still a win when you get a chance to provide training and network time for the community. Kudos to Joe Healy for organizing the overall event and getting MS to fund… Read more

Shawn Weisfeld has been the President of ONETUG (Orlando .Net Users Group) for the past three years and has just turned over control to Jessica Sterner as he gets ready to move to Dallas for a new job. Shawn has been very active in the community and INETA, and he… Read more

One of the big themes this year for Microsoft (and I just saw it on the PASS Summit site) is about IT Heroes. Perhaps I'm just hard to live with today, but I don't think there are too many heroes in IT. We work hard, we make a big contribution,… Read more