What had me reflecting on numbers was an article in the Financial Times (Conduit of Contention if you can find it) that talked about the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, which settles all the equity trades on American exchanges. According to the article the DTC settled 1.48 quadrillion dollars… Read more

Someone recently asked me if I would work for a company if I didn’t believe in their products or services (to the point that I would consider them the best). It’s an interesting question because it reflects the trade offs many of us make when selecting jobs, and there is… Read more

Project plans should try to plan for some unknowns. For large projects they include known risks, vacation time, maybe even the loss of a key person or a parallel business crisis. For smaller projects it’s just x percent of slack time that can be used as needed. You do what… Read more

Just a few notes about things I’m doing over the next few months:

• July 30 – Attending SQLSaturday Birmingham. I went to their first one and had to skip last year, great to have time to go back to see one of my favorite SQL groups
• Aug 13 – Making…

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If you’ve done networking in the MS world you know about the trust options between domains, and one of the nice features of Windows Server are transitive trusts. If A trusts B and B trusts C, then A trusts C. Technical stuff, but I want to talk about the… Read more

How long does it take you to get comfortable at a new job. How long to figure out who is who, find someone people to have lunch with, and feel like you’re fitting in? Consultants do better at this that employees simply because they go into new situations a lot… Read more

I’ve put a lot more emphasis on networking in the last few years and I’ve always considered it an investment, the kind of investment that you think will pay off but has no guarantee. It’s not a certificate of deposit type investment.

Does it pay off? How often does knowing… Read more

Just announced yesterday, SQLSaturday #100 will be held in Brazil on November 26, 2011. Just a little over four years since we started the planning for #1 in Orlando, it seems like both a long time and not very long at all. A lot of people have volunteered a lot… Read more

I’ve written a lot here, but for June & July (and part of August) I’m trying to just keep the ship moving (my part of it at least) while I recharge. I still manage to have a few things going on, so here is the 60th update on my efforts… Read more

The eternal challenge with games, and free/cheap software in general, is knowing what’s out there, especially since you don’t always know what you’d find useful! For illogical reasons I’m a lot more willing to take a chance on stuff on my phone that I would on my laptop – maybe… Read more

I’m late posting it, but I was featured on SQLPeople for June 27th. It’s a project Andy Leonard has going on and it’s interesting indeed to see the similarities and differences from those of that work with SQL Server.

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A quick plug for my friend Blain Barton from Microsoft, he’s got a series of three broadcasts that are video, but done in radio interview format. Worth a look.

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It’s so easy to make make mistakes with dates. Here is another one I saw recently, this one used when doing some checks on some billable data that had been captured:

select * from sometable where somedate between ‘6/1/2011’ and ‘7/1/2011’

Nine times out of ten when you see that… Read more

Once again this year we’ll be holding a meeting open to all SQLSaturday event leaders and key team members (and space permitting, we’ll also welcome SQLSaturday volunteers at any level). Karla from PASS HQ will be sending out invitations in the next couple weeks, but for now wanted to get… Read more

I was reviewing some code recently that has been in production for a while and I saw something like this:

set @SomeDate = getdate()

delete from sometable where datecol > @SomeDate – 3

…..lots of work here, several seconds to a minute

Insert Into SomeTable….new rows where DateCol > @SomeDate…

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I saw an article in the newspaper titled How to Visit 30 Ballparks in 35 Days This Summer.  I think it would be an I interesting idea to visit all of them and see some of America in the process, but doing it in 35 days seems less like… Read more

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My children never cease to delight me in all kinds of ways, but never more when they come up with some unusual twist out of the blue. My youngest daughter loves to play hide and seek, and always has to be the first to count (seek). Lately when it’s my… Read more

Just got an email from the Space Coast User Group that Maciej Pilecki (@DrHouseOfSQL) will be doing a presentation to the group on July 14th. Great for a chapter to get a well known speaker.

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If it hasn’t happened already we should be close to beginning the election cycle for the 2012 election. Last year we had rough election and we’ve made some changes since then. In particular because we had a rough election last year we need a good pool of candidates this year.… Read more