I've made my living through both consistency and change. I've been an advocate of and have made my living by doing many things in T-SQL that some folks may have never considered. I do things outside the proverbial box such as avoiding SSRS to do simple things like turn my automated morning server reports into HTML formatted wonders. I fight the tide of nay-sayers by locking down my systems well enough to be able to turn on and confidently use xp_CmdShell correctly through stored procedures to download from SFTP/FTP sites and even run Powershell from T-SQL to create my daily disk space report complete with different colored warning indicators.

My consistency is the power of T-SQL and the changes I've made to do different things have been an eye opener to even me.

I commissioned a friend of mine to build a bit of artwork that explains my mantra. It has the likeness of the "Cheshire Cat" comfortably laying belly down in a litter box, his arms folded over the side and bearing an ear to ear and very toothy grin, with several mice around him pointing and laughing. The sentence near the top of the work says it all for me...

[font="Arial Black"]"Before you can think outside the box, you must FIRST realize... you're in a box!"[/font]