Building With Iron Pipe

For a while I’ve been wanting to do a project that used black iron pipe for the main structure. Kind of a Lego’ish appeal for grown ups, if such a thing is possible. It’s strong and not hard to work with as long as you can stick to the stock lengths (you can cut it […]

Moving to Open Live Writer

I’ve used Windows Live Writer for almost as long as I’ve been blogging (mid 2007 or so). It’s worked well enough and I’ve liked having an offline editor. It moved to open source after years of stagnating (though it still worked well enough!) and I’ve finally moved to that version (at the same time I’m […]

Speaking at OPASS on February 25, 2016

Last month I visited MagicPASS, this month I’ll be at oPASS and presenting again on my pattern for automating database restores. It’s a still evolving presentation, but one that I think engages attendees. They know how to restore, they know why, so it’s just layering some ideas on top of that. If you’re in the […]

Pausing PASSWatch & What's Next

I just posted Pausing PASSWatch on the PASSWatch blog, wrapping up a project that ran about 16 months. It’s hard to call it a success, based both on stopping it and not accomplishing as much as I hoped, yet I don’t see it as a failure either. I learned a lot and maybe did a […]

SSC Question of the Day: DBCC Error 6

My latest question of the day on SQLServerCentral is DBCC Error 6. Text of the question below: As the on-call DBA, you received calls of timeouts and errors on a SQL 2012 SP3 instance used for testing. You track the issue to IO requests that are taking longer than 15 seconds and coordinate with the […]

SSC Editorial: Design a Better SQL Server Pricing Model

Design a Better SQL Server Pricing Model ran on January 21, 2016 and as you can guess from the title is about the challenges we have with the current pricing model…and how we might improve it. Nothing simple about that, from our perspective or from that of Microsoft. Ultimately it just feels more complex than it […]

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