Reminder – SQLSaturday #38 in Jacksonville Tomorrow

It’s the third time for Jacksonville, hosting SQLSaturday #38 tomorrow at the University of North Florida. It’s about an hour and a half drive for me, just far enough to merit staying over when combined with the chance to do some networking Friday and Saturday evening. I’m doing one presentation, will try to do some […]

Book Review: The Checklist Manifesto

I saw The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande ($15 @ Amazon) at the bookstore and had to read it. I’ve used a few checklists over the years, short ones and long ones, the longer ones perhaps stretching the definition and being more of a standard operating procedure (SOP) type document. The main setting for the […]

New SQL Server Standard: Resource Governor by Roy Ernest

The latest issue of the SQL Server Standard is available for download (login required, free registration). Volume 7 Issue 4 features an article titled Resource Governor by Roy Ernest (LinkedIn, Twitter). Good free learning! Ready to write something professional and share it with your peers? You need some previous writing experience (and obviously strong technical […]

American Express PASS Card (Not What You Think)

Had logged in to American Express check my business account and noticed this on on the front page – a PASS Card targeting teens and young adults, essentially a refillable pre-paid card (which costs you $3.50/month). You can even customize it with the persons picture. Not as thrilled about organization based cards, usually not a […]

Review: SSD Tweaker

Ran across this while doing some other reading, SSD Tweaker lets you change a few settings that are supposed to boost (or at least not degrade) performance on an SSD drive. No install, just download and run the exe. Tried it on my laptop and it turned off a few things via the ‘Auto Tweak’, […]

PASS Update #31 (Election Prep)

Sometime soon we’ll start the process of the 2010 PASS election, with three seats on the Board of Directors being on the ballot. Before we get to the details of the election, I thought I’d look back at my 16 months on the Board so far and share some thoughts on what I’ve learned from […]

Upcoming Presentation for Professional Development Chapter

I’ll be presenting “Building a Comprehensive Professional Development Plan” on May 13th via Livemeeting to members of the PASS Professional Development Chapter. Here is the revised abstract: A good professional development plan has to go far beyond ‘learning more technology’, it has to encompass the wide variety of skills you need to build the next […]

Follow Up: LinkedIn Poll

A couple weeks ago I wrote about testing the LinkedIn polling capability, putting up this poll: The response rate wasn’t great, only 34 responses, but none of them valued technical competence as the most important attribute. That feels right, and it’s powerful statement to managers; be a manager, not the alpha geek. But it’s also […]

PASS Update #30 (Surveys)

Recently we released the results of the annual survey to determine interests for the 2010 Summit. That’s a step in the right direction, sharing the results, but what we didn’t do was share what we thought we had learned from the results, and we were taken to task some by Steve Jones and Brent Ozar […]

PASS Update #29

By the time you read this we’ll have completed the transfer of the SQLSaturday web sites and data to PASS HQ, leaving only the clean up tasks of transferring the domain and the email aliases for active events, something we plan to do by the second week of May. It definitely took longer than I […]