There have been quite a few more SQL Saturday announcements this week for new cities. I enjoy attending these events, and look forward to going when I can. I have plans to go to Baton Rouge (#28) in August and Pensacola (#22) in June, after having wonderful times in those… Read more

As SQLServerCentral grew, we evolved through a few email sending solutions to meet the demand. We started with a manual process, then went to a homegrown automated one, then moved through 2 purchased software solutions before coming back to a (new) homegrown one.

When we used to try and send… Read more

My T-SQL Tuesday post for April is based on Aaron Nelson’s subject of reporting. If you’re unsure of what T-SQL Tuesday is, you can read about it’s origins here.

The Reporting Table

Years ago, actually well over a decade in my past, I was working for a small… Read more

I ordered a few recently from NewEgg. One for a desktop, one for a laptop. We’ll see how they do, but I was excited enough to snag this picture when they arrived.

$200 for 80GB.

Read more

After my editorial “The Missing Certification” I was amazed at the debate that took place. As of the time I’m writing this, this thread has over 7,000 views and 600 replies!

It’s incredible to see people debating certification, but what’s evolved is kind of a working thread that… Read more

I’ve had the Prius for 3 years as of Mar 31, 2010, and it’s been a great car for us. As the 3 year mark turned over, I was at just over 60,000 miles, which is a pretty heavy load. That level of driving really contributed to my positive experience… Read more

An interesting experiment from Microsoft tonight. They brought 8 or 9 bloggers/press people from around the country to Redmond for a 3 hours briefing/wine tasting. We were picked up from the airport, taken to a hotel in Bellevue and then shuttled to the Commons building on the Microsoft campus. It’s… Read more

Read more

I stumbled across this clustered index test from Hugo Kornelis recently from a post in the forums. I think I’d read it before, but it was surprising to me again this week as I read through it.

The test seems to show that if you are changing data over time… Read more

I missed my first newsletter today. It wasn’t until I went to schedule tomorrow’s that I realized I hadn’t sent last nights. I had prepped it, done the work, gotten the editorial written, podcast done, articles scheduled. Things were ready to go, but I didn’t get the newsletter out. I… Read more

It’s not often that I’ve had the need to trace back a client to their host computer, but there are time it’s handy. I had thought that the easy way to do this in the past was with sp_who.

However that’s not correct. I checked back in the SQL Server… Read more

I saw a note that T-Mobile is accepting trade-ins of an iPhone for credit towards a new HTC HD2. That’s interesting, and almost tempting. Not that I don’t like my iPhone, but I’ve been tempted to look on eBay for a 16GB one as I’m running low on space. Plus… Read more

Recently my son had a short paper to write for school. He’s a sixth grader, and this year is a turning point for him where he’s expected to think a little more about his writing as well as tackle longer assignments. In this case it was a 2 page paper… Read more

Here were the goals I posted for 2010 on the last day of December:

Read more

Sometimes I think I’m quite the goober. Alternately I’ll laugh or put my head in my hands as I try and clean up the video for an editorial.

I typically save some blooper reels for holidays and try and get a break from all the writing, but I always have… Read more

Some good jokes going around, and the few I wrote for SQLServerCentral went over well. There was a good one at work as well, with my boss “delaying” April Fools until next week so we could get work done, and perhaps another one on the free food. Not sure if… Read more

I’ve always said that it didn’t matter what the database was. If it could do the job then it’s worth using. I have never worried about whether I had an Oracle database, SQL Server database, or any other platform. If someone wanted to pay me to work on it, then… Read more