We have just kicked off The Mentoring Experiment after talking about it for months. There has been a lot of interest and quite a few applications submitted. We’ve even had a lot of people ask if we needed help mentoring people, which is great. If you’re interested, you still have… Read more

Why should you go to the trouble to start blogging, speaking, answering questions or anything else. What’s the point?

I’ve written a little before about this. When you build a brand, it helps you to stand out from others. You become more noticeable, and more likely to get the interview.… Read more

A sad weekend, and shocking news Sunday morning. I was out running errands when I checked email and found out a friend had been killed in a plane crash on Saturday afternoon. He was a Boy Scout and Girl Scout leader, someone who I have gotten to know quite well,… Read more

Apparently a lot, at least according to the blooper reel today

Read more

When I was in college, and even high school, all of my computer science classes required me to build algorithms. Often they were simple things, like implement a sort, or reverse a string, or shuffle a deck of cards. Those seemingly silly and trivial exercises, however, build the skills of… Read more

Andy Warren (LinkedIn | Blog | @sqlandy) and I had an idea for a way to give back to the community and help people. It’s the Mentoring Experiment, and we are taking applications from people through April 20.

If you’re interested in finding a mentor, and want to… Read more

I failed.

There’s no other way to say it, but I’m not really disappointed or discouraged. I’m actually fairly upbeat about it. I went into the Microsoft Certified Master test thinking that I’d fail because it aims to be a high end certification. I felt like I had a huge… Read more

Matt Velic is hosting T-SQL Tuesday this month. You have a week to get a post ready on the apply operator.

To help you out, here's the BOL page on Using the Apply operator. It's an operator that essentially lets you invoke a table valued function for each row… Read more

I have been trying to get to Dallas for a SQL Saturday for nearly a year, when the first event was announced last May. I finally made it this past weekend with the third SQL Saturday in less than a year taking place on April 2, 2011 in Richardson, TX. Read more

I have been trying to get to Dallas for a SQL Saturday for nearly a year, when the first event was announced last May. I finally made it this past weekend with the third SQL Saturday in less than a year taking place on April 2, 2011 in Richardson, TX. Read more

How do you check if you are a sysadmin? It’s fairly easy to do in Management Studio. You can go to Security \ Server Roles \ Sysadmin, as shown here:

You right click sysadmin and click properties to get a list of sysadmins. You can do this for any role,… Read more

The PowerPoint deck from my presentation is here if you want it

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Presentations/70959/

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Read more

I joked about having a 22 hour layover in Denver yesterday and a few people were wondering what airline screwed me this time. That made me laugh, because they didn’t get the joke.

I got home yesterday at 3:30pm from SQL Server Connections in Orlando. I’ve been there all week,… Read more