It’s time for a new laptop. I don’t think it’s time, as I love the Macbook Air I bought a couple years ago. Rather some requirements for work, mainly Hyper-V, have come up and I can’t meet them with the Macbook Air. Even a 2013 summer refresh of this platform… Read more

Our first DBA Team event, in Richmond, VA just before SQL Saturday #187 went well. Overall I think our experiment was a success and we’re already talking about where and when we might do this again.

In the meantime, we didn’t make a separate site for this series of events,… Read more

I’m late writing this, and I did mean to get to it earlier, but life got in the way.

TL;DR: It was a great event, lots of fun, and I’d love to do it again.

When I first heard of a SQL Saturday coming back to Richmond (from Carlos Chacon Read more

Next week I head out to SQL Saturday #197 in Omaha NE. I’m looking forward to it as I’ve never been to Omaha, and only been to the state once, in the far SW corner to Oshkosh for a horse race. I’ll arrive Friday and have a short time to… Read more

I love my MacBook Air. It’s small, light, and it works well as a traveling laptop for me. It starts and stops instantly, and the only complaint I have is that my 2011 version only has 4GB of RAM and no USB 3.0. The 2012 version improves, and I’d upgrade,… Read more

This is a short series on some customizations in SSMS to make it visually more appealing.

As a presenter, I’ve learned how to change the way Management Studio (SSMS) looks to make it easier for people to see the screen on a projector. I had wrongly assumed that so many… Read more

I got this image in the mail recently, and it made me laugh. It looks like a police lineup, perhaps something from The Usual Suspects.

I don’t think there are any suspicious looking characters in there (though maybe the third and fourth from the left in the second row… Read more

This is a short series on some customizations in SSMS to make it visually more appealing.

As a presenter, I’ve learned how to change the way Management Studio (SSMS) looks to make it easier for people to see the screen on a projector. I had wrongly assumed that so many… Read more

A great piece by LZ Granderson, and one that really make me stop and think a bit. Work and life is always a balance, and men certainly don’t have it easier. We make different choices, or we set different priorities. It’s worth the read, and as you do, before… Read more

It’s the second Tuesday of the month and time for T-SQL Tuesday again. This is a monthly blog party, where the participants write on a particular theme. This month Jen McCown, of Midnight DBA fame, invites us to talk about files and filegroups in SQL Server.

If you’re like to… Read more

I use the Google calendar service extensively. I host my domain there and I’ve gotten used to the calendar. When I set up my Windows 8 desktop, I was curious if I could use the built in calendar app instead of living in a web browser.

A quick search found… Read more

This weekend is SQL Saturday #187 in Richmond, VA. Today’s a travel day for me, as I head out early because Red Gate Software is sponsoring a half day event tomorrow, Friday, where myself and Grant Fritchey (b | t) will be speaking. This is an experiment for… Read more

While working on some demos recently, I needed to drop an index for a test. I executed this generic statement for an index I’d just created.

   1: DROP INDEX ix_IndexName

Needless to say I was surprised when I got this error:

Msg 159, Level 15, State 1, Line 1

Must… Read more

This spring I’m speaking at the SQL Intersection conference. It’s a new conference, managed by SQLskills founders Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randal. It’s April 8-11 in Las Vegas, and it’s got a slew of amazing speakers that I’ll be alongside, including Brent Ozar, Grant Fritchey, and more.

If… Read more

I bought a new (to me) desktop recently to replace my aging hardware. I’ve had a quad core machine, but it’s about 4+ years old, still running DDR2 RAM, and it’s been slowly failing. That sounds crazy with electrical hardware, but the clock has been flakier the last few months,… Read more