TechEd Comes to Orlando in June 2012

Just saw the official announcement MS TechEd will be in Orlando June 11-14, 2012, at the Orange County Convention Center. Here in Orlando that means we need to get busy with oPASS and ONETUG to see if we can engage some of the speakers that will be in town for the week – always seems […]

SQLSaturday #85 in Orlando!

It’s that time of year again, actually a little earlier than in previous years as we’ll be holding our fifth annual event this year on September, 24, 2011, at Seminole State College in Lake Mary, FL. We’re moving to a new building this year as well, the Partnership Center. It’s a brand new building, larger […]

Building a PASS Voting Solution – Part 4

We’re almost at the end of the SQL side of things, just needing to send out notifications/reminders. I was torn here, I already had a proc to send a link to a single user, but using it here would mean a loop. Even if it was slow it wouldn’t matter, we do a handful of […]

Building a PASS Voting Solution – Part 3

Today we’ll look at the server side code portion of the solution. I’m definitely in favor of stored procs, so that’s what you’ll see here. I typically only handle errors within a proc if I have the ability to do something there to fix the problem, otherwise I raise them back to the application. I […]

Building a PASS Voting Solution – Part 2

Yesterday I wrote about deciding to build a quick and dirty voting solution. Or to try to at least! Should be interesting to see how I fare with you all:-) Here are the tables I ended up with: As you might guess Ballot holds the overall description of what is being voted on, BallotDetail […]

SSC Editorial – Bad Database Design

I wrote this editorial about bad design based on some real world experiences. It’s a fun story, maybe even borderline ridiculous, but the truth is the database design wasn’t as big a problem as you might expect. We got rid of some of the duplicate data bulk caused by the ‘seach columns’ (an upper case […]

Buying a Second Seat on the Plane

Saw this article about more elbow room, the premise being that is it is often cheaper to buy a second seat than it is to move to business or first class. Strangely, some airlines don’t let you do this, and almost all of them don’t make it obvious that you can do it. Which, being […]