After months of planning, SQL Saturday #67 is finally upon us! While this is the 3rd SQL Saturday I'll be attending, it's the first one I've had a hand in planning. It's been a real pleasure to be part of such an awesome team putting it all together along with:
– Wendy Pastrick (blog | twitter)
– Norman Kelm (blog | …
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I enjoy watching college basketball but am absolutely horrible at making my NCAA tournament bracket each year. This time around, rather than spending an hour making guesses, I decided to let SQL Server do the work for me. Besides it's way cooler to be able to justify your bracket with T-SQL, right?

My bracket is based …

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T-SQL Tuesday this month is being hosted by the one and only Jes Borland (blog | twitter), and the topic of the month is aggregation. Powerful and fast aggregation tools are one of the biggest reasons to use a database. Without them, there would be a lot less awesomeness to look forward to – kind of like a meal …
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If you've been following my blog, you'll know that I've written quite a few posts about the wonders of cloud backups and why you should be doing them to protect your precious data and memories. This doesn't just apply to personal computer use – businesses should be taking advantage of offsite backups as well. Large …
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This Month's T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Pat Wright (blog | twitter) and Pat is asking about tips and tricks for making life easier through automation using either T-SQL or PowerShell.

Recently I have been doing more and more work in PowerShell in order to get familiar with it. So far I've been quite happy. Batch …

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After working with data day-in and day-out for a while, it doesn't seem unreasonable that thinking about the domain and appropriate datatype for storing a set of data would become second-nature. I know it's that way for me. Sadly, I can't say the same for one of the banks I do business with, which shall remain …
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I haven't had a real meat-and-potatoes technical post in a while and for that I apologize, however as you can see at the top of the page, this blog is "on SQL Server and kindred subjects". I'll have to write more about where the "kindred subjects" part came from later, but I'm clearly not limiting …
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It's been a little while since I've read a non-technical book, so I thought I'd give this one a try. This full name of this book is DownTime – A Guide to Federal Incarceration, and that's exactly what it is. It had an answer for pretty much anything I'd ever wondered about federal prison, and a lot of things I hadn't …
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This month is the 14th T-SQL Tuesday (my how time flies!) and it's graciously being hosted by MidnightDBA and newly-minted MVP Jen McCown (blog | twitter).

Jen is asking what our techie resolutions are for 2011 – what we hope to accomplish and why. I think this is a great topic, and I'm so glad I hadn't already done a …

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What do you call someone who graduated last in their class? In this case, me! I recently took Microsoft Exam 70-433 (MCTS: Database Developer 2008), and am pleased to report that I passed. I'm happy to offer up some of my thoughts as well as tips for those who might take it in the future.

Scoring – Why Bother?

So you …

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