First, figure out what you want to write about. It should be something you have passion for. And it should be something where you don't really care if people read it or not. At least that's my philosophy. I write because I love to write. Thankfully, some people see some… Read more

I've talked about trying to do a SQL Saturday event in Columbia, SC, for the last couple of years, ever since Andy Warren first asked me about it. I've never been able to put together a team to be able to tackle this, but it looks like we have a good… Read more

Among the Microsoft certifications, the Microsoft Certified Master is the apex of all of them except maybe the Microsoft Certified Architect. But you can't run down to your local bookstore, grab a few books, and go take a test to earn it. It requires 3 weeks of study at… Read more

I try to keep a pretty tight lid on the comments to the blog because there's a lot of SPAM out there. And I've noticed that there's a type of comment that isn't exactly SPAM, but doesn't really fit as a "comment." It's when folks ask for solutions to problems,… Read more

Having gone to an academic magnet school, I have quite a few friends who are teaching at the university level now. And every so often I see a post by one of them about a plagiarism issue. This is in college, where the student handbooks clearly have language about what is… Read more

This post comes from a conversation I had with a developer last week as well as my experiences over the weekend. My developer friend and I were hashing over war stories. He's a senior development/application architect level and he's seen his fair share of poor production deployments, one of which… Read more

As an infrastructure and security architect, I cringe any time any one mentions the following:

• Domain Admin
• root
• sa

Those accounts can do anything and usually if an application is written to run only with one of those types of accounts, it means the people doing the coding were lazy.… Read more

Cross-posted from the Goal Keeping DBA:

Read more

Within a couple of days of each other, both Andy Leonard (@AndyLeonard) and Paul Randal (@PaulRandal) tweeted about possible job opportunities which would entail working with them. Here they are  

This got me to thinking about working with/for high caliber folks. Andy and Paul are both SQL Server… Read more

That's right, folks, I'm now a model. Or at least, a model DB. Tom LaRock released his most recent rankings and I've moved up from MSDB to Model. So while I won't be gracing the catwalks of Rome or Paris any time soon, I'm humbled by the props thrown my way.… Read more

PASS has released the survey results as well as its decision about where to hold future Summit events. The decision is to keep it in Seattle for the next two years. I've been upfront about wanting it on the East Coast, so needless to say, I'm disappointed. Seattle is a… Read more

Tuesday night I was having a conversation with my younger son, whom we call Turtle. It's a nickname that came from missions camp, because of his great love of turtles. For my oldest son, we told him that when he hit age 12, he would need to pick a… Read more

I had a really bad habit of trying to jump into the middle of something I didn't know very well, if at all, especially when it came to technology. I attribute it to my days of playing video games when you pulled the game out of the case, stuck it in,… Read more

I'm reading a book by two teens called Do Hard Things. It's a book which represents a rejection of the low values and expectations the world at large has for teenagers. Their point is that just because you're aged 12-18, the belief you are incapable of taking on difficult challenges… Read more