If you work in software development or IT long enough eventually you're going to find yourself in a situation where you have to work during off-hours; it's just the nature of the job and can happen for a variety of reasons like: hardware failure, a new client is brought on… Read more

A minor annoyance of mine for a long time has been how SSMS will sometimes prompt you to connect to a server and sometimes just connect automatically when a file (or files) gets dragged into the window. Thanks to an "aha!" moment with a coworker I've finally figured out why.… Read more

There's been a lot of attention given to professional networking (e.g. Andy Warren's blog posts) recently and if you recall I'm planning on kicking off my PASS Summit experience this year by attending Don Gabor's pre-conference session on starting conversations. It's perfectly reasonable to go to a conference, code… Read more

Just a quick note to call out that I've had an article posted on SQLServerCentral that shows how to retrieve table row counts by using sysindexes & DMVs instead of select count(*). It's a 2 minute read – check it out here (free registration required) and if you like… Read more