Farewell Brook Ranne

For members of the SQL community in Orlando and Chicago you’ve probably heard that Brook Ranne died on March 29, 2014. Brook was part of our group here in Orlando, someone growing into SQL Server and always ready to volunteer, especially at SQLSaturday Orlando and Tampa where she was almost always managing the check-ins. She […]

SQLServerCentral Editorial: Doing What It Takes To Get The Job Done

I wrote Doing What It Takes To Get The Job Done about a conversation with my nephew working late to finish up some work. The comments so far are interesting and reflect the challenge of phrases like “get the job done” that can all to easily be abused into excuses for whatever behavior. Phrases can […]

Writing a Question Of The Day–More Notes

Today I wrote another question based on an error message. I included the error message in the question this time and it’s reasonably helpful, but the question text will, depending on how you read it, point you to the one good answer or convince you the answer must be somewhere else. I’m guessing it will […]

It's Not All About The Keys–Question Of The Day

My latest question is live today, called It’s Not All About The Keys. It’s a three pointer, if score matters to you, and that also indicates it’s not an easy or obvious question. I think it’s an ok question. Re-reading it today and reading the comments I still find it really hard to put in […]

Simple And Amusing Question Of The Day

I was working on a script today to check the range of some values and trying to take the time to handle edge cases, even though I don’t expect them (edge cases!) and ran across something I knew but hadn’t thought about. Good fodder for a question, but not a complicated question, at least if […]

Quarterly Goals

Over time I’ve settled on quarterly goals as the best way to focus on the stuff I most want to get done. I still think about my long term goals and I still have to do short term planning, but quarterly goals work out to be the most useful measure when explaining my goals to […]

Writing My Next Question Of The Day

I ran into a simple error last week and saved it to convert to a question. It’s another one where if you saw the error, it’s an easy fix. Minus the error it challenges you to visualize and understand how thing work. Overall I spent about an hour on it over the weekend and reviewing […]

Follow Up To A Questionable Trigger

This question of the day didn’t turn out well at all – required too big a leap the way it was written to get to the key answer. Four were easy, one was not. I confused the issue with a less than great trigger – not deliberately, sadly. The lesson – learning it again – […]

SQLServerCentral Editorial: Team Reputation

Maybe too serious a topic for a Friday, I wrote Team Reputation because I like working for good teams – who doesn’t? Most teams are average and that’s ok, but it’s a lot more fun to be part of the big red machine if you get the chance (and have the game).

The Untold Story of SQLHotties.com

Back when SQLSaturday was in the #20’s or so I bought SQLHotties.com, thinking it would be good for an April Fools joke to build a mock ‘adult’ site that catered to/featured people from the SQL community. I was at SQLSaturday #33 in Charlotte not long after that, talking with some friends about work and life […]

SQLAndy

Month: April 2014