This week the SQLRally team published some notes to help you convince the boss to send you to three days of great training. It’s good stuff and worth reviewing, and I want to add a couple tips of my own:

• Make it concrete. Get a copy of the schedule and…

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Just a quick post today for those you who haven’t visited www.sqlsaturday.com lately, we’ve got a lot of events coming up including first timers in Hawaii, Portugal, and New Zealand. I know those might be a bit far to travel (but what a trip it… Read more

Not everyone uses IE and that’s ok, but what’s strange is that by default if you point Firefox at a Reporting Services report the display gets chopped to about 200 pixels. The fix, documented on this post by Jon Galloway, is to modify the CSS to force the height (and…

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I’ll be speaking at the upcoming Orlando Code Camp on March 26, 2011, at Seminole State College in Lake Mary. I’ve included a copy of the schedule, a truly awesome array of topics and talent! Jack Corbett & I will also be doing our bit to raise awareness about SQLRally Read more

Karla Landrum just announced SQLSaturday #77, coming to Pensacola on June 4, 2011. Pensacola is a great weekend destination, hit Hemingways on the beach for lunch or dinner and visit the aviation museum – and do some tech learning too of course! I won’t make it this year, it’s a… Read more

You might be reading this hoping that I have the magic answer on how to make the Report Manager portal look the way you want it to, but as of SQL 2008 R2 we’re still pretty limited. Shouldn’t it be easy – maybe even part of the install – to… Read more

The first ever IT Camp is being held in Tampa on March 19, 2011, organized by cool Tampa guy Chad Miller. I’ll be there as an attendee and then talking for a couple minutes during the closing ceremonies about the upcoming SQLRally. It’s long overdue for more community… Read more

SQL Server has LIKE, which lets us do various pattern matches, but most commonly we use the percent side as a wildcard, such that “where lastname  like ‘Smi%’” matches Smith and Smit and Smithy. It’s a useful tool. It can also be used to do a contains type search, something…

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I’m pleased to be joining the West Palm Beach .Net group on March 22 to do a presentation on SQL Server statistics. It’s part of my effort to participate more in the Florida community and to spend more time with the developers. Always stuff to learn on both sides. I’ll… Read more

Part of why I love IT is finding patterns and creating new ones. Patterns by themselves are interesting, but when you’re able to automate a pattern that’s when you start to really deliver value to a business. The result of that work is what I call process, and it might… Read more

By default Firefox doesn’t pass through NT credentials, not a big deal when you’re browsing Amazon by a big pain when you’re trying to hit a corporate Reporting Services site – you get prompted to enter credentials each time. It turns out there is an easy fix, just modify the… Read more