What I've found so far is that Big Data is a nice vague term so loved by IT vendors rather like "Cloud".

There is Big Data as in vast amount of...

I could be wrong but I thought that InnoDB was the engine closest to the model used by SQL Server and therefore THE engine that is transaction safe.

I didn't think...

It's worth mentioning that some queries require additional casting in order to work across the link otherwise you get hexadecimal gobbledegook.

SELECT

CAST(NAME AS VARCHAR(64)) AS TableName,

CAST(COALESCE(Engine,'') AS VARCHAR(64)) AS Engine,

COALESCE(ROWS,0)...

I find email to be a bigger distraction than anything else.

At SQL Bits Buck Woody (Microsoft) and Kevin Kline (Quest) mentioned that email and IM technology is banned between...

Mental note not to play Scrabble with you!

I've just told the wife shes...

I sat a Myers Briggs test with my department. As an Aspie I asked if it could spot personality defects, at which point my boss started to laugh.

We were...

I drive an 11 year old Ford Focus Estate with 162K on the clock.

I suspect that I am a Lancia Beta judging by the bits of me that are breaking,...

In my experience affordable storage capacity has kept abreast or slightly ahead of storage requirements until quite recently.

What I am seeing now is storage requirements outstripping the capacity/performance available.

A typical...

This is one of those presentation vs content items.

I wish the tools were intelligent to store a common interpretation but present as the individual prefers.

To me the presentation of this...

Compression to save disk space is of dubious value unless it saves IO.

With technologies such as Fusion-IO and SSDs where you are talking about literally thousands of times that of...

I'm trying to install SQLSharp on a SQL2005 server patched up to build 5000.

I can do it provided I mark all the assemblies as UNSAFE.

Installing on a SQL2008 server presents...

Worth mentioning that this technique works well on any data subject area where there is a defined set of answers.

For example, permutation/combination figures, significance tables.

I was quite proud of coming...

success has many fathers, failure is always an orphan.

There are so many reasons why project fail. Two people have a discussion, both think they have reached a common understanding and then prove conclusively that they don't.

Stretch that...

Calculating correlation statistics