I was scanning blogs the other day, and noticed Tom LaRock's new image on Twitter. He's SQLRockstar after a little complaining from a large company about SQLBatman. I like the new persona and redesign of the site.

In any case, Grant Fritchey AKA The Scary DBA, noted that he… Read more

I saw recently that Brent Ozar wrote a blog about justifying the cost of attending the 2009 PASS Summit. I tend to agree with the reasons that Brent listed and think he presented a good case, but I thought I should give a few thoughts from my perspective. PASS… Read more

I noted recently that I purchased a new desktop with the intention of moving to Windows 2008 and Hyper-V. That arrived, and I've been working on setting it up.

It's been great and got me wondering if I could do the same thing on my laptop? After all, I bought… Read more

I have a new machine, albeit one with a bad video card, running Windows 2008 Server R2 with Hyper-V. My plan was to use this as my workstation and run Hyper-V for various things, SQL Server, Visual Studio, as a browsing desktop, etc.

I wrote recently about finding a few… Read more

A lot of people have asked what happened over the Memorial Day weekend as SQLServerCentral was down. All I can say is Twitter is cool. It didn't save the day, but it helped me.

When I got up Monday morning, Memorial Day, things on the site were slow, but I… Read more

I had the video card go bad in my new desktop, so I spent a few minutes rolling back to the old one, only to find networking extremely slow. It took, literally, about 5 minutes to open Google's home page, slowly bringing down data, despite the connection saying it was… Read more

A great Hyper-V blog here at Accentient Blog.

I was searching around for information on setting up Hyper-V and I ran across this blog, which has some great instructions for getting started. Including a 3 part series on Using 64-bit Windows Server 2008 as a Workstation OS, which is… Read more

You have a few options for protecting your SQL Server data at rest. So far I haven't seen anything thing protects data in memory, and I'm not sure we ever will. After all, at some point it needs to be processed, joined, etc., and that can't happen if it's well… Read more

I’m giving my talk on The Modern Resume – Building Your Brand a few more times this year and I’ve got a tentative schedule here:

June 6 – SQLSaturday #14, Pensacola, FL.

July 2 – Richmond SQL Server Users Group, Richmond, VA

Nov 11 (tentative) SQL Connections,… Read more

I installed Hyper-V onto a new machine as a role for the base Windows 2008 server role. It required a reboot, and once it was back up, I went to create my first virtual machine. The Hyper-V manager was confusing for a few seconds since it wants to connect to… Read more

I'm on a few publishers' lists as someone that reviews books, works with SQL Server, and in general might help them sell copies of books. A number of friends from SQLServerCentral, and other sites, have written books as well, and often send me copies.

Just the other day I received… Read more

I was late with family issues, and so I missed the social time when I was expecting to do a little networking and meet some new people. Instead I arrived during the short presentation from Glenn Barry, who's a local MVP and I've seen speak a few times. Attendance… Read more

I saw an interesting blog post from Andy Leonard (@AndyLeonard) recently on what he thought Twitter was. I'd started my own post here, with some thoughts, and had to go back and rewrite things (Thanks, Andy!). He got me thinking, and I agree, it's something completely new.

I… Read more

I got my MVP goodies the other day in the mail. My bag is upstairs, not yet used, but I have to go out tomorrow and I'll see how it does. I wore my HALO shirt, so it's in the laundry, but look for that in a podcast soon.

My… Read more

I saw this mentioned on Twitter, and watched it while doing some light editing and scheduling. It’s from TechEd 2009 in LA, and includes a number of MVPs and consultants and even a Microsoft SQL Server program manager.

It’s a video, running about 55 minutes, on The Pros and Cons… Read more

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Tto the beat of “Rapper’s Delight”

“Now what you hear is not a parse

I'm rapping to the code

'cause me, my tweeps, and the devs

are gonna try to gen a load.

See I am the D-B-A

and I'd like to say hello

to the devs, the PMs,… Read more

As I'm digging more into SQL Server 2008 encryption I'm learning some interesting things about how SQL Server handles encryption. Recently I was doing some research on the HASHBYTES function, which performs a one-way hash on data. This is useful in terms of validating secure passwords or determining is some… Read more

My rolling 30 day post count dropped crazily this weekend. I noticed, but with family committments, I didn't do anything about it. I think I posted 3 times on Sat and maybe 10 times today while podcasts were rendering. That was after I left Friday with a rolling count of… Read more

Phantom power, also called Vampire power, is power that's used by electronic devices even though they're powered off. I've also heard it's a big deal with various chargers being plugged into sockets, but their corresponding devices not being attached. For example, a cell phone charger left plugged into a wall… Read more