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Where can you find deep dish pizza, questionable politics, amazing architecture and a great SQL Saturday all in one stop? Sweet Home Chicago! The organizing committee in the windy city has been hard at work, and SQL Saturday #211: Chicago 2013 is open for registration.

This year the event will be taking place on …

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Three weeks ago I had quite the trip to the Pacific Northwest. I was very fortunate to present in Portland at SQL Saturday #172, and then headed up to Seattle for the 2012 PASS Summit. It was a fantastic week and I hope I can do something similar next year! Here's some thoughts I had from each event in no particular …
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At work, a key function of my team is importing new systems into our data warehouse, most of which come from vendors. To do this we utilize many different methods depending on the capabilities of the source system and desired timeliness of the data. ETL through SSIS, snapshot replication, and transactional replication …
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This is going to be a crazy week!

I'm very happy to be speaking at SQL Saturday #172 in Portland, Oregon on November 3, 2012.I’ll be giving my presentation entitled The Skinny on Data Compression which covers the different types of data compression available in SQL Server and some of the details behind how they work. …

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Back at the first Chicago Free-Con event in 2011, Brent Ozar was talking about how wonderful the SQL Saturday movement is and prophesized that in the near future we'll be seeing similar free training events put on by individual vendors instead of community volunteers. Eighteen months later I found myself at Red Gate's …
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This year, time seems to be flying by faster than ever. It's October already, and we're up to our 35th installment of T-SQL Tuesday. This time we're hosted by Nick Haslam (blog | @nhaslam). Nick's asking "what is your most horrifying discovery from your work with SQL Server?"

The story that scares me the …

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More often than not, I’ll expand the “Tables” folder in SQL Server Management Studio and browse the list to find whatever table or index I’m looking for. This works well in many situations, but when your database has over 20,000 tables, the results can be overwhelming! As your databases get larger and more complex, you …
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In our formative years we’re taught again and again that one should never judge a book by it’s cover, but when seeking employment that all goes out the window when you create a sheet of paper so that potential employers can judge you by it. Ironic, eh? That’s life, so  make sure your résumé represents you in the best …
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Earlier this month Michelle and I visited friends in Virginia, and one of the places we checked out was Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s primary home and plantation. I highly recommend going there if you’re ever in the area. It was very informative on many levels, but my favorite takeaway was learning what a geek …
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