Every Sunday, Michelle and I sit down to brainstorm what we'll be eating for the week ahead. From there, we come up with a shopping list for our weekly grocery shopping that afternoon as well as a menu which goes on the refrigerator. This may seem like overkill, but we've found that not having a menu planned out in …

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Alright, the title of this post is a big fat lie. I would have given my left join to experience the PASS Summit firsthand in Seattle, but it wasn't meant to be this year. Luckily thanks to the magic of teh internetz, I was able to feel like I was there. I'd like to thank two groups of people for making this possible: …

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In my previous post I asked for your votes in the SQLServerPedia Awards, and now I'm happy to say that I won the award in the internals category. I'm so honored – thank you to all who voted! Also thank you to SQLServerPedia for making it all possible and to editors Iain Kick (blog | twitter), Kevin Kline (blog | …

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If this were an actual campaign commercial (in the U.S. at least…) I would now proceed to not say anything about myself and simply bash other people with comments like: So-and-so uses Microsoft Access and likes it My Opponent sets their databases to auto-shrink They somehow get their job done without ever leaving their …

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This month's T-SQL Tuesday comes a week early so it doesn't conflict with the PASS Summit, which makes sense since many active bloggers will be in attendance. Sadly I won't be, but there's always next year! Paul Randal (blog | twitter) is hosting this time around, and the question he's asking is "Why are DBA …

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A while back, honorary SQL geek Sarah Sjolander (blog | twitter) posted her bucket list after watching the movie of the same name. I have yet to see that movie, but thought I'd share my own personal bucket list that (until now) resided only in my head. These items are listed in descending order of the possibility of …

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A long time ago I can remember wondering what happens when you try to update a value by setting it equal to itself – whether the database engine will actually carry out the update or just ignore it. At the time I didn't think much of it, but it popped into my head again last week and I decided to find out. I'm sure I'm …

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This was the first non-database related book that I've read in a long time, and its full title is actually "Dr. Deming: The American Who Taught the Japanese About Quality". I was expecting to read about the life of W. Edwards Deming, but instead the book was more of a summary of his teachings and management …

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This Month’s T-SQL Tuesday topic comes from Sankar Reddy (twitter) and he’s asking for SQL Server myths and misconceptions to be de-bunked. I’ve got 2 myths I’d like to set the record straight about. They’re rather closely related, and concern the "Lock Pages in Memory" setting. What’s it do? Without getting into an …

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When I started this blog I had zero intention of reviewing movies. I wanted to stick to technical topics with perhaps a few book reviews in-between. That goal hasn’t changed, but after seeing “The Social Network” this past weekend I decided an exception would be appropriate. In my opinion, the SQL Server community gets …

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