The keynote for SQL Saturday #52 in Denver, that didn’t go as smoothly as I’d like due to technical difficulties, however I am hoping I got my point across. Here’s what I wanted to say:

Who does p90x? Body for Life? Some other exercise routine?

Do you think these programs… Read more

It’s getting close to the time for the SQLServerCentral party events this fall, and time to start gathering up SWAG to give to people. In the past, I’ve hosted a SQLServerCentral party at the PASS Summit, and it’s always been a good time. Our first year, 8 years ago, we… Read more

If one index helps speed up queries, than more indexes should help more, right? They do, but they also come at a price. Both in performance during data modifications (insert/update/delete), and in terms of space since each index must be stored somewhere.

I have never bothered to index every column… Read more

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I was listening to a friend give a presentation on getting a job recently. In the presentation, Chris Shaw, the speaker, mentioned my Modern Resume presentation, which was cool, but he also said something interesting in his talk.

He said that social networking is huge, and you can choose not… Read more

Don’t forget the food drive tomorrow for SQL Saturday #52 in Colorado. Please bring food, or even clothing/blankets, that can be donated to local people.

I’ll be taking a portion back to the food back for my local area, and we have a number of people from Boulder looking to… Read more

Not quite a day of rest, likely some chores in advance of another busy weekend at the ranch.

I’m taking today off for a few reasons. Originally I had planned it as my kids were out of school and we had booked a trip to the Denver Mint. That’s exciting… Read more

How often have you seen someone write a DML trigger like this:

There seems to be this common misconception that a trigger… Read more

I saw a post recently that said that braindumps were the best way to prepare for certifications. It was posted from a certification vendor, so take it with a grain of salt, but I think a lot of people think this.

That somewhat torques me off. I understand that certification… Read more

I actually had a question of the day submitted on SQLServerCentral about table variables and transactions, but the person didn’t have a reference for it. So I had to go digging around to find one. It doesn’t seem to be documented in BOL, but numerous MVPs and MS employees have… Read more

After speaking this coming weekend in Denver at SQL Saturday #52, I’m heading to SQL Saturday #53 in Kansas City the following weekend, to give my Modern Resume presentation again and meet some SQL pros in another city.

It’s not just me, however, that is making the trip.… Read more

What’s ACID in databases? I was asked this in an interview a long time ago and I couldn’t remember the exact meaning. For a (supposedly) senior DBA, that’s bad. I could, however, tell what it means and what it enforces in the database, I couldn’t remember the actual words.

In… Read more

I ran across a thread that was asking how to grant rights to a person for one table only, and not other tables.

My response is simple:

CREATE ROLE MySingleTableRole
GO
GRANT SELECT ON dbo.MyCustomers TO MySingleTableRole
GO
EXEC sp_addrolemember 'MySingleTableRole', 'Steve'

That’s it. By default… Read more

I’m back in the top 5 for the first time in a long time. I’ve been spending too much time in the forums lately, avoiding other work, but trying to answer some questions for people and help them out.

I used to always be in the top 5, but this… Read more

Twitter is an amazing beast. More and more I find myself getting useful information and ideas from Twitter. For someone that works at home, it’s a great window into the world outside.

A couple days ago, a friend posted that they were looking for a science fiction book to read,… Read more

Some days I think I go full retard.

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It’s time for T-SQL Tuesday again, the brainchild of Adam Machanic (Blog|Twitter), and this month’s topic is Indexes. A thanks to Michael Swart for hosting this month’s event, and sending me a personal invite through email. That was pretty cool, especially since I don’t necessarily remember… Read more

I don’t like there being an easy command to shrink databases, and I especially don’t like seeing the shrink option as a part of the default maintenance plans.

However it seems that this technique for managing sizes is used quite often, and even given as advice by some people. A… Read more

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I ran across a great blog titled: Post 300 or why all developers should be blogging. The reasons given in the articles are great, and I think they apply to all technical people.

You will learn by blogging, and you will keep stuff in a place that you can… Read more