March Madness is once again upon us, which means it's time for one of the biggest time sinks of the year: filling out a bracket for the pseudo-sanctioned office NCAA pool. Along with the superbowl, this is a hallowed time when bosses turn a blind eye to all the cash that seems to be heading towards that person who has …

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This month's T-SQL Tuesday is brought to us by newly-minted MCM Argenis Fernandez (blog | @DBArgenis), who I had the pleasure of meeting in person for the first time a few weeks ago. Argenis is asking if we specialize or not, why we do (or don't) specialize, and why we feel that's a good thing. For a very long time …

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Knowing when and how often your indexes are used can really come in handy. Indexes that are never utilized aren't worth keeping around, and knowing their usage patterns can be a big help when making decisions regarding things such as filegroup placement and compression settings. SQL Server 2005 brought some great …

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Happy New Year to all! At the start of 2011, I laid out some goals for the year and did an update on them back in July. Now that it's 2012 it's a great time to take a look at what I accomplished (and fell short on) last year and also set some new targets. My 2011 goals were as follows: Speak More – I spoke at two SQL …

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This month's T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Allen White (blog | @SQLRunr) and is an invitation to show off a nifty T-SQL trick you use to make your job easier. Here's one of my favorites as of late: Some of the source systems we copy from shard their data across multiple similar tables. For example, instead of having 1 …

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The third time's a charm! SQL Saturday #119 (Chicago 2012) has been posted on the SQL Saturday website! It will once again be held at the DeVry University campus in Addison, IL and will be on May 19, 2012. SQL Saturday in Chicago has a special place in my heart for a few reasons. The first SQL Saturday I ever attended …

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Well, we're back at the top of the month again, and this time around for Meme Monday we're to talk about what we'd love to see under the tree from Microsoft. This got my creative juices flowing, and I came up three wishes: First and foremost, if I had one wish that I could wish this holiday season, it would be that all …

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This month brings us the 24th edition of T-SQL Tuesday (24 already? wow….). This time around our topic comes from Brad Schulz (blog) and has to do with stored procedures and functions. Brad's asking us to write whatever we'd like about either of them. While from the bird's-eye view both functions (the table-valued …

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After my trek to Iowa City last year for SQL Saturday #50, I knew I'd have to travel to more out-of-town SQL Saturdays in the future. Unfortunately I couldn't make it back to Iowa City this year, but I was very happy when I found I would be able to travel to Kansas City this time around for SQL Saturday #101. This is …

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Have you ever had one of those times where you spent hours trying different ways to make something work the way you envisioned, only to find that the solution was staring you in the face all along? I have those more often than I'd like to admit – and while the title of this post seems like a DBA 101 topic, the answer …

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