I should know. I was one of the judges of this year’s Exceptional DBA of the Year award. I had to read through tons and tons of submissions and help to arrive at a final list of people who truly personify the concept of both the DBA and the exceptional… Read more

I presented a session at the SQL Saturday event in Oklahoma City last weekend. The event itself was pretty good. The organizers put everything together pretty well and the venue was quite nice. Plus, since I grew up in Oklahoma (Tulsa), it was a chance to go home. The event… Read more

It’s time to get your learn on again. The schedule for the Fall 24 Hours of PASS is up and ready for registration. This is the Summit preview session, so many (most, all) of the speakers are showing off some of what you can learn at their sessions at… Read more

A couple of weeks ago I posted about how different execution plans look when using the Azure Management Portal. I promised to look at a more complex plan and here we are. The query looks like this:

SELECT	*
FROM	dbo.Agent AS a
		JOIN dbo.Resource AS r
		ON a.AgentId =…

Read more

I can’t sing and I can’t play and I left the young generation behind a while ago, but I’m still coming to your town, or maybe one near you.

Between August and December I’m hitting a substantial portion of the country, so if you want to have a little fun,… Read more

I read an excellent article by Camille Fournier about the importance of recognizing that being right is not the only factor that needs to be taken into consideration when making a decision. You could even change it from “being” right to “doing” right. Although, I mean it in a technical… Read more

If you’re moving to a fully-fledged SQL database as part of Azure you may never even touch SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). Instead you may do all the management of your SQL database through the Management Portal. You can actually do everything you need to through this tool. This includes… Read more