600 Miles, Limits, Fears, and Possibilities for SQLSaturday

Last week PASS published some new guidance for SQLSaturday that sets a 600 mile rule (has since been updated, still keeps the radius) to keep events from being held too close together and another that reduces the funding from PASS for most events. I appreciate the stated goals, find myself a bit frustrated at the […]

SSC Editorial: Should I Stay or Go?

Really late linking to it, Should I Stay or Go is about being more assertive about making the decision to change jobs or projects. It’s easy to decide to leave when things are terrible, much harder when it less than optimum – because most jobs are!

Karla Set the Standard

Last week Karla Landrum announced that she will be leaving her position as Community Evangelist later this year after five years. That means change for PASS and for us and for Karla, but just the nature and scale of that pending change illustrates how much Karla has done in the those five years. Karla was the […]

GIT Learning Resources

I’ve spent most of my career using VSS and TFS, mainly because that’s what was being used. Better any source control than none. Now I’m working with a tam that uses Git, so I’m learning enough to check-in changes and merge and clean and the other basics. I’ve gathered a few resources, you’ll probably use […]

Retrieving the SQL Server License Key

Strangely enough its been a long time since I installed SQL in production. It’s almost always done by someone on the server team and that’s fine with me, clicking the wizard (or running the install script) isn’t the interesting part. Today though, I needed to add a named instance (also rare) and didn’t have the […]

PASS Nominating Committee Update

Today PASS released a bunch of stuff for the upcoming election including the attributes of an “ideal candidate”. We put in quite a bit of time on that description, in part because people often ask “am I ready” and in part because it is the next step in doing a better job of qualifying candidates […]

Names From the Past

Can you guess what all of these people have in common? Shawn Weisfeld Joe Healy Barry Ralston Trey Johnson Jon Winer Wes Dumey Donnie Reynolds Kevin Jacobs Joseph Memmo Brian Knight Michael Antonovich Declan Link Patrick Thompson Jeff Garbus Jim Blizzard Ken Tucker Jessica Moss Bayer White Joe Celko Judy Pipia Jean-Claud Armand Michael Wells […]

SQLSaturday Orlando 2016 Call for Speakers Closes July 17, 2016

We’ve advanced the closing date for the SQLSaturday Orlando call for speakers to July 17. That’s to give us time to set the schedule and have it announced around August 1, just a little more than 60 days before the event. We’ll get an email with that information out to the Orlando speaker list later today. […]

The PASS Speaker Agreement

I hope when you’ve read all of this post that you’ll think that I’ve added to the discussion and not fueled the fire. The various posts and discussions and the time writing this (multiple drafts) have definitely caused me to re-examine my own views. I’ve found that some were simplistic (might still be!) and others […]

MS Exams Increasing In Price

Just glanced through the MCP newsletter and see that the price of the exams (or at least the one I looked at) is increasing from $150 to $165. It’s hard not to question whether the exam is worth $165 (or even $150) – it just doesn’t have a lot of value in the market (which […]