I just found out today that I will be one of the speakers at SQL Saturday #51 in Nashville, Tennessee on Saturday, August 21, 2010.  My presentation will be:

DMV Emergency Room!

If you have ever been responsible for a mission critical database, you have probably been faced with a…

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I’ve been looking for a new “thin and light” laptop to use for teaching, and for presentations and demonstrations at upcoming SQL Server events, such as SQLSaturday and the PASS 2010 Summit. I wanted something that that had a 32nm Arrandale processor, and weighed less than five pounds. I… Read more

Microsoft has released CTP1 of Project Houston for SQL Azure. Project Houston is a Silverlight web based database management tool that lets you manage and develop SQL Azure databases using a web browser. You have to go to SQL Azure Labs to access this CTP of the tool, but it… Read more

Microsoft has released SQL Server 2008 SP1 Cumulative Update 9 (CU9). The KB Article for the CU is located here. This is Build 2789, and it contains 34 fixes, that are pretty well scattered over the Engine, SSAS, SSRS and Full-Text Search.

Don’t forget, Microsoft has “retired” the RTM… Read more

Fellow SQL Server MVP Arnie Rowland (blog | twitter) has done a great job organizing an interesting effort to help unemployed and underemployed software developers to improve their skill set, while also helping a deserving non-profit organization, school or church solve a problem. The background to this is… Read more

Today, I received the official word that I will be presenting two sessions in the SQLServerCentral.com track at the SQL Server Connections conference on November 1-4. I feel quite humbled to be included with the other great speakers at the conference. The SQLServerCentral.com track includes myself (blog | twitter Read more

Red Gate Books has published a new e-book called “SQL Server DMV Starter Pack”, which you can download for free here. This e-book is based pretty heavily on my DMV a Day Series that I wrote during April, 2010. The other authors are fellow SQL MVPs Louis Davidson ( Read more

I just found out yesterday that I had one of my General sessions approved for the 2010 PASS Summit in Seattle coming on November 8-12.  Here is the session title and abstract that I submitted:

Hardware 201: Selecting and Sizing Database Hardware for OLTP Performance

The foundation of database performance… Read more

I thought I would try to do a few quick tests to compare the performance of assigning values and comparing values using some of the different string data types that you have available in SQL Server. It turns out that there is a significant difference in performance for these operations… Read more

Microsoft has made the Community Technology Preview (CTP) of SQL Server 2008 SP2 available for download. This is Build 3798, and it includes the fixes that were a part of SQL Server 2008 SP1 CU8. It also allows you to enroll SQL Server 2008 instances as Managed Instances in a… Read more

I have been playing around with the new Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit 5.0 Beta 2 tool for the last couple of days, and so far I am pretty happy with it. It lets you scan machines using Active Directory and WMI, so you can inventory your current hardware,… Read more

Since I got my grid-tied solar PV system on my roof turned on almost two weeks ago, I have gotten a number of questions about it from friends and neighbors. There seem to be some common misconceptions about how a system like this works, so I will try to dispel… Read more