I just finished reading Success Is A Choice: Ten Steps to Overachieving in Business and Life. Written by Rick Pitino, a highly successful collegiate and professional basketball coach, this book was a good read in that it was well organized, eloquent, and included many stories from the author's own experiences.
As the title suggests, the author offers ten rules that must be adhered to to achieve maximum success. Like other self-help/motivational books, there's nothing here that would be considered groundbreaking. However, Pitino and co-author Bill Reynolds have a way of relating to the reader so that one recognizes his own shortcomings without feeling like a scolded puppy.
Chapter 8, entitled "Be Ferociously Persistent", was, in my opinion, the zenith of this book. With a well proportioned mix of timeless quotes, common sense, and personal experiences, Pitino reinforces to the reader that continued hard work is necessary to achieve and maintain success. If you buy into the whole "4 Hour Workweek" thing, you won't enjoy Chapter 8 - the author correctly illustrates that success requires that you work harder, longer, and with greater intensity than the next guy. I also enjoyed the final chapter, "Survive Your Own Success", which serves as a reminder that success itself can be poisonous if you allow yourself to become complacent in your achievements.
If you're looking for a clever book to guide you to success shortcuts, this is not the book for you. However, I do recommend this book as a concise motivational tool, a brief but useful set of reminders to those who are willing to go above and beyond.
If you're like me, you've probably typed in LTRIM(RTRIM([value])) hundreds, if not thousands, of times during your travels through SQL Server. I've long wondered why there was no integrated function that would serve this purpose.
Pinal Dave (@pinaldave) has submitted an item on Microsoft Connect to suggest the TRIM() function as an addition to Transact-SQL. He correctly points out that most programming languages have this feature baked in.
So if you're on board with the movement to add TRIM() to T-SQL, log in to Microsoft Connect and add your vote and comments.
... and other times, they are stop-you-in-your-tracks funny. Here's an example of the latter:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/brianmadsen/archive/2009/04/21/funniest-code-comment-ever.aspx
Over the past 2 days, I’ve gone full bore into Windows 7. I’ve installed RC0 on 2 of my laptops, and so far I’m happy with the results.
The first installation was very quick and easy. I had an unrecoverable operating system error on my XP installation, according to the hardware guys, and needed to reformat my machine. I had just pulled down the bits for Win7 RC0, so I replaced the defective XP install on that machine with the 32 bit version of Windows 7. This machine, a 2 year old off-the-shelf Dell with 2gb of RAM, performed quite well during and after the installation. The install process only took 40 minutes, and Windows 7 had drivers for everything but my video card which, oddly enough, had to be configured using the 64 bit Vista driver. Performance is excellent; the time from login to desktop readiness seems a little longer than on XP, but apart from that, it performs as well as the older OS. My install of SQL Server 2008 Dev was easy and uneventful.
The second install was done as an upgrade to my Vista 64-bit machine. I’ve only had this laptop for about 6 months, and have been disappointed in the performance despite having invested in hefty hardware. I installed the 64-bit version of Windows 7 on this box, performing an upgrade rather than a clean install. The upgrade took much longer than the clean install; it had run for over 2 hours when I finally gave up and left it to run overnight. However, once completed, I could tell an immediate difference in performance. It boots and loads my profile at least 30% faster than Vista, and so far I’ve found no compatibility problems. I do have a message that warns me of a problem with my video driver management software, but the driver itself still loads up without error. I had to reinstall the sound driver, but the Vista version on HP’s website installed quite nicely. Both versions of SQL Server (2005 and 2008 Dev) seem to run fine in the upgraded OS.
So far, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the ease in which I was able to upgrade these systems to Windows 7. I’m hopeful that the RTM version will be as easy a transition. I’ll be sure to pass along any major problems I find, particularly those that affect SQL Server, Visual Studio, or their derivatives.
