SANS does seem to have been successful. Certs are an interesting topic, but I think we'd all agree not the easiest out of my list. Can I get more discussion...

Gail,

I hear you on clustering, or other niche technique that not all of us may have the hardware/environment that allows us to be able to do them blind folded. Im...

Matt,

One thought on the cert is that the MCDBA (or equivalent) while useful for driving career development is essentially useless for an employer looking to evaluate an employee or consultant....

Thanks for the comments so far!

Grant, I disagree with you on the certification part. I think it would cost money, but it would be self supporting. Picture a process like...

One correction to the article, the full price for membership is $150 and not $250. Thanks to Bill Graziano for pointing it out to me. Steve has made the change...

I think at the method(stored proc) level defining constants as set @somevar=somevalue is easy to do, readable, and maintainable. I saw the earlier comment about module level constants and while...

You're right that archiving isn't technically partitioning, but it's often thought of at the same time and I think people often apply one technique instead of the other. Next article...

I think putting the discussion topics at the bottom has value. It reminds people that there are forums and they are frequently trafficed and that there are a lot of...

Im familiar with the scenario, but Im not sure I'm sold yet that this is substantially better - one more syntax with quirks you have to learn! Performance could be...

It should work:-) I added a report to a project, then added two images as well. Source=external, value==IIF(Parameters!SetBack.Value="DRAFT","e2ead2.png","e2ead1.png"). Report worked fine in IDE or deployed. I would start by making...

I like the idea of disabling job steps. As mentioned it is possible to do this by changing the success action, but I think much cleaner to just temporarily turn...

Its only a pain to do in TSQL. ADO/ADO.Net mask much of the headache. Creating your own paging system just to avoid TEXT feels like reinventing the wheel.

I dont have a SQL2K instance installed anymore to experiment on, but my guess would be that it's a path problem more than a security problem, but it depends on...

Thats a pretty good analysis James, though I disagree about replication - unless its merge!

Yeah, normally I do the copy, but got interrupted and was merrily typing away, just lost track. Ouch again.

I think a professional development blog should be external, and you should...