In preparing for the SQLPeople event, I thought about the role, motivation, and techniques of a “knowledge worker” in today’s society.

I found Peter Drucker at the library. Drucker lived from 1909 to 2005 and was one of the original writers about… Read more

Not too long ago, Andy Leonard (blog|twitter) dreamed up the idea to create the SQLPeople community. The community is forming around the stories and ideas of its members. The SQLPeople website shares stories.

I spoke at the first SQLPeople event!

And now SQLPeople events are… Read more

Wondering what to do when you get a break from work email today?

Make your opening move in a fun contest.

What’s to win?

The prize is tempting booty: Idera Software is giving away a free trip to SQLCruise Alaska. And not just part of the trip, it’s the full… Read more

You know what’s crazy?

A comprehensive, technical, well thought-out, and ENJOYABLE document. One written with the occasional interesting diagram and a reasonable use of acronyms, with effective tables and practical advice. A document that’s written for a human being which has helpful links… Read more

There’s a lot of dynamic management and system objects to keep track of in SQL Server.

We all sometimes have the moment when we can’t remember exactly which DMV, DMF or other system view/function returns a particular column, or if something even IS accessible from the system objects.

When this… Read more

The Goal

It’s often useful to be able to run a bunch of stored procedures in the background over a period of time against a test instance.

This can be nice for:

• Demos and presentations.
• Populating DMVs with data you can slice and dice.
• Learning to use things like extended…

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This post is about two things:

1) Your Page Verification Settings are Critical

You should confirm you are running with the correct page verification settings on your SQL Server databases. It’s very important, and I’ll show you why.

2) I Should Attend the Awesome SQLSkills Master Immersion Event – Internals…

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Let’s make one thing clear from the start:

This Post Tells You How To Corrupt a SQL Server Database with a Hex Editor in Gruesome Detail

And that’s all this post tells you. Not how to fix anything,… Read more

Optimizing queries is the most fun when you don’t need to add indexes. There’s nothing quite so nice as finding a way to make reading data faster, without slowing down writes or creating new data structures that need to be maintained.

Here’s one way you can use BACKWARD scans to… Read more

With every new year I think a little bit about time and dates. This posts looks a little more at that in TSQL.

Rounding Dates: Which way is best?

Sometimes in TSQL you need to round a datetime value to the precision of either a day, hour, minute,… Read more

In A Previous Installment

… our heroine (that’s me) rediscovered CTEs, specifically in the recursive style. That was in my post “Filling in Data Potholes with Recursive CTEs.”

To recap: I was working on a problem with gaps in temporal data. The basic scenario was:

Imagine that…

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I’ve been thinking about the upcoming 24HOP event planned for March 15 and 16 which will showcase 24 women speakers. Karen Lopez (post | twitter), Jenn Stirrup (post | twitter), and Jen McCown (post | twitter Read more

Imagine that you are writing a script that looks at data grouped by the minute. You notice that there are no rows for some minutes, and you’d like to display a value when that is the case, probably showing a count of zero.

In… Read more

The 12 days of SQL

Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) had an idea: a group of people should blog about writing which they’ve loved this year by people in the SQL community. For each “day of SQL,” someone picks a blog which they thought was great and writes… Read more

This week a question on the Twitter #sqlhelp hash tag reminded me of a detail of SQL Server that I learned the hard way, but forgot to blog about. The question was:

For those without images enabled (you anarchic luddites), that’s “Is there a good reason to… Read more

This past Saturday I presented my shiny new Introduction to SQL Server Partitioning session at SQL Saturday 61.

There were two separate sessions scheduled for partitioning that day, but the room was still full– thanks everyone for coming to learn about how, why, and when you might use this… Read more

Note: Updated 10/28 based on conversation in the comments, and 12/10 with Denali info.

TSQL Tuesday #11: Misconceptions in SQL Server

This month’s #tsql2sDay is hosted by Sankar Reddy, and the topic is roughly, “Things you thought you knew, but didn’t.”

For my entry, I’m picking a… Read more

Yeah, you heard me.

“But Kendra, why would we want to grant developers read  permissions? And why would we automate  it? And at what point did you lose your mind?”

Well, Virginia, there may or may not be a Santa Claus, but there are a… Read more

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday topic is hosted by Robert Davis and the topic is “How do you learn? How do you teach? What are you learning or teaching?”

Learning: If it’s Not Fun, You’re Doing It Wrong

Like many people, I’m an active learner. I learn by doing something– writing… Read more

Update: Based on Bill Ramos’ comment below and a note on Twitter (thanks!!) I have added some more details which hopefully make the situation clearer.

Summary

When setting up data collection using the GUI, configuration failed halfway through setup. At the point  of failure I… Read more