Today I had a bit of regret slap me in the face.  That face slap came from participation in a SQL Quiz on twitter that was hosted by Paul Randal (Blog | Twitter).  The questions being thrown out there were deep technical internals type of questions.  These weren’t… Read more

SQL Server 2008 has presented us a couple of options to aid in becoming better DBA’s.  You can see this evidenced in many ways in the product.  A couple of the things that make me think this is the case boils down to two functions that are new in SQL… Read more

Awesome news.  I submitted a presentation for SQLSat 83 in Johannesburg South Africa for May 7, 2011.  I saw that they were opening up the presentation schedule a little bit to allow for remote presenters and I decided to give it a try.

I got an email notification yesterday that… Read more

News Flash

The SQL Community is about to get stronger.  Why?  There is a great new initiative that was recently launched.  Steve Jones and Andy Warren are teaming up to conduct this initiative.  As they aptly named it, the new initiative is called “The Mentoring Experiment.”

How many times have… Read more

Have you heard about this new project out there called SQLPeople?  It is a new (relatively) project that is the brainchild of Andy Leonard.  Andy is trying to help the community to get to know each other better than they already do.

Part of this initiative is to conduct interviews… Read more

We have another opportunity to write as a part of TSQL Tuesday today.  This month Matt Velic (Blog | Twitter).  Matt has proposed a challenge that was derived from a comment on twitter.  The challenge this month is to write about “Apply.”

Admins Apply Within

As an administrator… Read more

I was strolling along one day when I saw somebody asking how to find out who owns a maintenance plan.  That evolved into finding out who owns the the job associated with the maintenance plan.  All of this in SQL 2005 and SQL 2008.

Well, we were stumped for a… Read more

Earlier this week I announced the meeting for the Las Vegas User Group.  I blasted some of you with emails – along with people in our mailing list.  Those plans are now changed.  No longer will the group be meeting on Thursday April 14th.  Instead we will be having our… Read more

Are you ready to learn again?  The Las Vegas SQL Users Group is ready to have our April meeting.  The meeting is to be held April 14, 2011 at 6:30 PST.

This month we have a BI presentation lined up and some top notch talent to present to us.  Erika… Read more

How well do you know the security in your SQL instances?  Do you know who has sysadmin level permissions?  SQL Server provides a few methods for you to find out who is a member of which roles at the server level.

For those that like to point and click, you… Read more

As a database professional one of the things that we should be familiar with is the use of indexes.  In SQL Server an index helps to improve query performance – when properly implemented.  There are some penalties in play when an index is created.  These penalties are typically associated with… Read more