As if I needed more.

I’ll be sitting at the blogger table and blogging live (as live as I get) during the keynotes. It should be fun. As I said on Twitter, this means I get to pick on the cool kids. Life is good.

Thursday I’ll be doing a…

I had no idea, but evidently I started a bit of a donny-brook. Cool!

Running the Profiler GUI against a production server is not something you should do. I’ve outlined my research into exactly why in the past. But I hit another little issue with the Profiler GUI as part of work I’m doing on a Microsoft PSS call (more on that in…

It’s alive! It’s alive!

That’s enough from Colin Clive.

It’ll be out for the Summit. SQL Server Standard lives again! Although, not quite in the same shape as it used to be. But hey, stitching stuff together out of dead tissue is messy work.

I want to thank our…

It’s just a week and a couple of days before I’ll be hopping a plane for Seattle and the 2009 PASS Summit. I’m as excited about this one as I was my first summit, maybe more so. I’m going to get to see a bunch of friends that I only…

No, I’m not talking about a Dickens novel. I’m talking about the number of characters in a string. I had a painful time recently because of the word “characters.” 

If you take a look at the dynamic management view sys.dm_exec_sql_text you can get the queries that have been run on…

Quest Connect 2009 is occurring even as I type this. Get on over there if you’re interested in some free training. I recorded a session on understanding execution plans. But even better, there are live sessions with some great people. Stop reading this, click the link, get yourself some free…

The PASS Summit agenda is shaping up and it’s already looking to be much busier than last year. The latest is the Birds of a Feather lunch. It’s lunch with an MVP. At least 50 different MVP’s will be hosting a table each. At each table a topic of discussion…

The Southern New England SQL Server Users Group’s October meeting was a bit sparsely attended with 7 attendees. The sponsor for the night was ApexSQL. The presenation was by AJ Dharmapuri who spoke on using DMV’s.

Barbara Sampson, SNESSUG Treasurer, did a demo of ApexSQL’s SQLEdit. It’s a pretty…

My second guest editorial is up at SQL Server Central. These are fun to do (especially the video) even though they’re a shocking amount of work considering their size. My hat’s off to Steve for churning these out day after day. The man does earn his keep. Anyway, go…

If you’re involved with maintaining Microsoft Operations Manager, you probably have a few things you’d like to tell the developers, such as, couldn’t you get some sort of override manager/explorer built into the system? Well, they’ve built a new feedback mechanism through the updated Connect interface. Get on over there…

I keep seeing these concepts that have long been disproven, posted again and again on newsgroups as if they were valid information. The latest? Table variables are better because they’re only in memory where as temporary tables write to the disk through tempdb. This one is abjectly wrong. I’m not…

Well, part of one anyway. I wrote three chapters of Rob Walter’s new book, Beginning SQL Server 2008 Administration. I think I’ve mentioned it before. Well, my copies showed up in the mail. Nothing like holding that book in your hands as proof that you’ve done it. When…

The PASS Summit is only three weeks away and I’m getting awfully excited. It’s not too late to register. Heck, you can register at the door, but you’ll pay full price. If you want to save a little, use this registration code, FRP3D, and tell them you know me.…

We had a good night with 13 people attending. I ran unopposed for president of SNESSUG for my second, and final, term. We were graced with the prescence of Jeff Moden, MVP and on of the top posters over at SQL Server Central. He was just visiting. He’s a…

Brent Ozar, Andy Warren and Jeremiah Peschka have put together a blogger award called the PASS Log Reader Award. I took a couple of posts that I did in the last year and entered. No, I’m not going to say which ones and I don’t expect to win because…

Ohio?

I’m presenting on Thursday to the Columbus SQL Server Users Group, home of the newly minted MVP, Jeremiah Peschka (congrats again). It’s to be a virtual presentation through live meeting. The topic is a Understanding Execution Plans. This time I hope that one of us remembers to hit…

Another frequently heard story is that stored procedures get and reuse execution plans, but ad hoc queries do not. A lot of people believe this and say as much online and in the real world. Unlike my last myth, this time, I’m going to give you the DBA answer to…

Great news. We’ve managed to get one article all the way through the process. We’ll have our first publication out within a couple of weeks. We might even get a second out at the PASS Summit. We’re working through the final details on contracts, author payments and the layout of…