Subtle Errors When Using Dates-Part 1

Note: My original code was not helpful (wrong!), the corrected version is shown below. I was reviewing some code recently that has been in production for a while and I saw something like this: delete from sometable where datecol > getdate() – 3 …..lots of work here, several seconds to a minute Insert Into SomeTable….new rows […]

Baseball and Scheduling Your Vacation, and a Puzzle?

I saw an article in the newspaper titled How to Visit 30 Ballparks in 35 Days This Summer. I think it would be an I interesting idea to visit all of them and see some of America in the process, but doing it in 35 days seems less like fun and more like work – […]

Count to 41

My children never cease to delight me in all kinds of ways, but never more when they come up with some unusual twist out of the blue. My youngest daughter loves to play hide and seek, and always has to be the first to count (seek). Lately when it’s my turn to count she insists, for […]

Maciej Pilecki Speaking at Space Coast UG on July 14, 2011

Just got an email from the Space Coast User Group that Maciej Pilecki (@DrHouseOfSQL) will be doing a presentation to the group on July 14th. Great for a chapter to get a well known speaker.

PASS Update #59 (Run for the Board)

If it hasn’t happened already we should be close to beginning the election cycle for the 2012 election. Last year we had rough election and we’ve made some changes since then. In particular because we had a rough election last year we need a good pool of candidates this year. We need people that care, […]

SQLSaturday #85-Call for Pre-Con Speakers

We’re going to be hosting two pre-conference seminars this year in Orlando on Friday, September 23rd, and we’re looking for speakers! All the details about eligibility and money are posted on the front page of the event site. It’s not huge money, but it’s guaranteed travel expenses and more importantly, it’s experience. Experience you need […]

ODBC DSN on 32/64 Bit Systems

Funny how you can work with data a long time and still run into something new. I’ve been working on an upgrade for a third party application with a few moving pieces – you know how that goes. One of the pieces is a batch processor and we struggled to get it running, and finally […]

Deleting Accounts from Websites

I ran across this article about How to Delete an Account from Any Website on the PC Magazine web site. It covers how and what options you have for about 30 popular web sites. Interesting how some make it easy and some don’t. As a data guy it’s definitely interesting. We’re not big on deleting […]

Book Review: Hour of the Horde

Hour of the Horde by Gordon R. Dickson ($1-$5 @ Amazon) is an interesting story. The basic plot is that one day the Sun turns red, an alien spaceship the size of Rhode Island shows up, and the aliens announce that the Horde is on the way, the Horde being one of those great alien […]

Google Correlate

My friend Rob Hatton pointed me to Google Correlate, a new service that lets you explore data trends in a few different ways. The theory is that the history of searches should expose both some interesting trends and correlations, often faster than than the way ‘official’ approaches work. On a lark I typed in SQLSaturday. […]