I would like to personally and on behalf of Andy, Brian, and SQLServerCentral.com apologize to Ken Henderson for publishing his work without credit.

It's a big statement, but one that I feel needs to be made. Recently I received a couple of emails from concerned members of the SQLServerCentral.com community. It seems that an article that we published in January was plagiarized from Ken Henderson's The Guru's Guide to Transact SQL. As I was on vacation, I couldn't deal with it for a few days, and I needed to find my copy of the book to check the allegation. Before I could, Mr. Henderson emailed and confirmed just that.

I promptly removed the content and put a placeholder up there instead, noting there was a copyright issue. I then contacted Ken and he confirmed that two other articles submitted by Kalpesh Thaker were also plagiarized from his books and I removed them as well.

I am truly sorry that this happened and there is no excuse to be made. I do not check the submissions we receive against any type of full text search to see if they have been copied and I'm not sure that I can, but I thought that this release could serve two purposes.

First, a public apology to Ken Henderson for having his work out there for months without credit being given.

Second, I would like to let the community know what has happened. I'm hoping that you who read these articles will keep an eye out for this horrible practice of copyright violation. Since many of you are reading more SQL books than I, or perhaps more recently reading them, you'll be in a better place to spot this than I.

With the explosion of the Internet, the growth of SQL Server, and quite a few new book publishing companies, including ours, it's difficult to track down plagiarism. It's also created opportunities for many more people to write and publish works themselves. This means that many more people are out there creating articles and books than ever before.

However publishing something carries a responsibility as well. If you put your name on something, it needs to be your original work. Rewriting someone else's work is acceptable only if you have added additional value and substantially changed their work. If I wanted to write my own "Internals" book, the language would need to be my own. The chapters would be what I decided and they shouldn't mirror what Kalen Delaney wrote.

The same thing applies here. The author said that Mr. Henderson had done a better job of writing, so he just used what was in Mr. Henderson's book. That's not only illegal, it's very immoral. You are misrepresenting yourself and your knowledge as well as infringing upon someone else's work. If you didn't write it, don't take credit for it.

I offer no excuses for what happened and if there is anything that I can do to prevent it in the future I will.

Steve Jones