The Scary DBA

I have twenty+ years experience in IT. That time was spent in technical support, development and database administration. I work forRed Gate Software as a Product Evangelist. I write articles for publication at SQL Server Central, Simple-Talk, PASS Book Reviews and SQL Server Standard. I have published two books, ”Understanding SQL Server Execution Plans” and “SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled.” I’m one of the founding officers of the Southern New England SQL Server Users Group and its current president. I also work on part-time, short-term, off-site consulting contracts. In 2009 and 2010 I was awarded as a Microsoft SQL Server MVP. In the past I’ve been called rough, intimidating and scary. To which I usually reply, “Good.” You can contact me through grant -at- scarydba dot kom (unobfuscate as necessary).

Archives: March 2010

SQL Saturday #39 New York

New York, New York, it’s a hell of a town. The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down. The people ride in a hole in the ground…

Anyway, my abstract for SQL Saturday #39 in New York was accepted a while ago, but I just got all my reservations set,… Read more

4 comments, 116 reads

Posted in The Scary DBA on 23 March 2010

Undocumented Virtual Column: %%lockres%

One of my development teams needed a mechanism for identifying the value of a key that was part of a lock (don’t ask). I’d never tried doing that before. Obviously if you hit the DMV sys.dm_os_tran_locks you can see the hash of the key in the resource_description column. But how… Read more

1 comments, 888 reads

Posted in The Scary DBA on 18 March 2010

SNESSUG March Meeting

Aaron Bertrand showed up to teach us tips and tricks for SQL Server Management Studio. We had to move our meeting night because of a conflict at our wonderful host, New England Tech. But we still had 12 people show up. For SNESSUG, that was a good turnout. I gave… Read more

0 comments, 110 reads

Posted in The Scary DBA on 15 March 2010

Location of the PASS Summit Follow-up

I got a little distracted after lunch and was reading through some of the various bloggers reactions to the decision to keep the Summit in Seattle for the forseeable future. I enjoyed Brent Ozar’s take on the situation, but the thing that struck me square in the eyes and inspired… Read more

1 comments, 130 reads

Posted in The Scary DBA on 11 March 2010

Location of the PASS Summit

There has been some discussion recently around the location of the PASS Summit. The debate was centered on the results from a recent survey hosted by PASS. Today’s Community Connector has an editorial by the PASS President, Rushabh Mehta, explaining why those of us on the East Coast will… Read more

4 comments, 126 reads

Posted in The Scary DBA on 10 March 2010

Blog Anniversary

Two years old. In March of 2008 I received a whopping 96 visits. I’m up to 1900 so far this month. I’d call that a positive growth trend. Thanks for stopping by, especially if you’ve been here more than once.

6 comments, 113 reads

Posted in The Scary DBA on 9 March 2010

MacGyver?

Who the heck is MacGyver? Television program you say? Hang on. I need to visit imdb.com…

Oh, the late eighties… Yeah, I wasn’t watching TV in the late eighties. Actually I didn’t own a TV in the late eighties. But reading a few of the plot lines (you guys… Read more

0 comments, 131 reads

Posted in The Scary DBA on 8 March 2010

Powershell for Batch Operations

I’m right in the middle of moving one of our databases from Oracle to SQL Server (and I just love saying that, over & over). Evidently the most common practice in Oracle is to leave all the tables as heaps. That’s a tad bit problematic approach for SQL Server. We… Read more

1 comments, 297 reads

Posted in The Scary DBA on 1 March 2010

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