Finding Your Next Job

We’ve had a few people in the SQL community find jobs lately and many of them attributable to their network. It’s good to have a network, good to be able to use it successfully, and I’m all in favor of growing your network. But…not all of us have a great network, and sometimes even the […]

Reminder – Final Day for Speaker Abstracts for SQLSaturday #49!

You can still submit abstracts through midnight tonight for SQLSaturday #49 in Orlando on October 16, 2010. Great time of year to visit Florida, and it looks like we’ll have a great variety of speakers again this year. Here’s the list of submitted sessions so far: Title Speaker A Broad look at securing your […]

Book Review: Rework

I recently read Rework by Jason Fried of 37 Signals ($13 @ Amazon) and it talks about a lot of philosophy and lessons learned from their business. Some of it I found interesting, some I agreed with – for example, his views on running a small business being ok, not having to have a 100 […]

Making Choices Narrows Your Remaining Options

I’ve had variations of this conversation a couple of times lately and thought it was worth writing down some thoughts. The essence of the problem is that people are often frustrated that an early decision ‘boxes them in’. Absolutely it does, and that’s why it’s important to figure out which decisions to make early, because […]

PASS Update #37 (Elections and Re-Election)

We’ve got 6 days left before the call for nominations for the 2010 PASS election closes and I want to make a last push to try to encourage more of you to participate. Jeremiah and Joe both have some great points about the benefits and I probably can’t top them, so I’ll just ask you […]

Notes on the July 13, 2010 oPASS Meeting

Short notes this time, but wanted to get a few thing written down: Attendance was about 20, lower than expected for a good perf tuning presentation. Talked to Jack afterward, think we’re static or declining, need to revisit our chapter plan soon. Nice presentation from David Pless from MS, good audience participation Meeting sponsored by […]

oPASS Meeting Tonight, July 13, 2010

Our regular monthly meeting is tonight featuring David Pless from Microsoft. Here are some notes about his presentation: This discussion will continue to cover how to troubleshoot performance issues on SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008. In this discussion I cover performance impact analysis using DMVs, SET options in SQL Server, and Profiler and […]

Access Annoyance – Bit Columns

Here’s another one that I’ve run into when linking to a SQL Server table that has a bit column. Maybe there’s a cleaner fix, in the past I’ve just changed the table to a tinyint with a check constraint. Bits are useful things, should just work.

Old McDonalds and The Cow Store

As a child did you have a place that was your ‘thing’, something that just the mention of it would throw you into an enthusiastic frenzy of ‘lets go lets go’? A place where the name got mangled a little, part child naming, part inside joke? I grew up in a semi-rural area, not much […]

SQLSaturday #49 Pre-Con Announced

We’re pleased to announce that Louis Davidson will be our pre-con speaker this year at SQLSaturday #49 in Orlando. Louis will be presenting a one day seminar on database design, a worthy topic and one about which Louis is both knowledgeable and passionate, looking forward to attending it myself! The competition was definitely fierce, all […]