IT Camp Saturday

The first ever IT Camp is being held in Tampa on March 19, 2011, organized by cool Tampa guy Chad Miller. I’ll be there as an attendee and then talking for a couple minutes during the closing ceremonies about the upcoming SQLRally. It’s long overdue for more community work in the IT Pro space, I’m […]

Leading Wildcards Aren’t A Good Default

SQL Server has LIKE, which lets us do various pattern matches, but most commonly we use the percent side as a wildcard, such that “where lastname like ‘Smi%’” matches Smith and Smit and Smithy. It’s a useful tool. It can also be used to do a contains type search, something along the lines of “where […]

Presenting in West Palm Beach on March 22, 2011

I’m pleased to be joining the West Palm Beach .Net group on March 22 to do a presentation on SQL Server statistics. It’s part of my effort to participate more in the Florida community and to spend more time with the developers. Always stuff to learn on both sides. I’ll be presenting in person and […]

The Power And Pain of Process–Part 1

Part of why I love IT is finding patterns and creating new ones. Patterns by themselves are interesting, but when you’re able to automate a pattern that’s when you start to really deliver value to a business. The result of that work is what I call process, and it might range from a batch file […]

JTDS & Grails

Recently I had the chance to do some tuning on a system that was built using Grails (formerly Groovy on Rails) and the short and hopefully accurate enough scoop for our purposes is that includes an ORM layer – a data abstraction layer. ORM’s excel at rapid development/time to market scenarios, and they can also […]

PASS Update #53 (Bylaws)

This week we posted some pending changes to the PASS bylaws. We try to do a review at least once a year and it’s a hard process. Hard because we have to agree on the change we want first, and then we have to figure out how to state it cleanly because this is a […]

What Should PASS Be? I Challenge You

PASS isn’t what it should be. I hear that a lot, and in many ways I agree with you. We’re finally growing and evolving, but we’re still far from what I think most of you expect from a true professional association. But. I’m not sure you or I have realistic expectations. So I want to […]

Notes from the February 2011 MagicPASS Meeting

I attended the second meeting of MagicPASS (no web site yet) on Feb 16 at Stetson University in Celebration, FL. Great facility – classroom style seating, dual projectors and screens, couldn’t ask for better. The only downside to it so far is that it’s $200 per meeting for the space, quite a chunk of overhead […]

Work Goals for 2011-Part 2

It’s been a few weeks since I wrote my early thoughts on my goals for this year, and you can tell it’s a struggle when it takes me to the second week of February to get them finished. Why such a struggle? I think it’s because I’ve lived in nearly a constant state of change […]

PASS Update #52 (ERC)

We’re doing weekly calls for the ERC (election review committee) and we seem to be making some progress. This past week we came up with a good outline of what we hope to see as the process for selecting the nomcom (look for a post from Bill Graziano for details), and you can from that […]

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