The Bit Bucket

One of the biggest pushes I was trying to make while on the PASS board was to help grow the organization into other areas of the world, and probably a little out of the organization’s comfort zone. We in western English-speaking countries often totally underestimate the passion for SQL Server and the number of professionals that work with it around the world. In my time on the board, I was both amazed and privileged to see the types of events already occurring and the vast number of attendees. Often these numbers simply dwarfed the typical numbers of attendees in more familiar locations.

2010-10-09

One of my colleagues, Itzik Ben-Gan is known to most in the SQL Community, particularly for his passion around the T-SQL language.

He’s recently written an amazing blog post that describes why these functions are needed, along with a plea for helping promote the ideas to the Microsoft product group via the Connect site.

Anyone with an interest in T-SQL should read the post as, by itself, it provides great insights into the language and the possibilities that some subtle changes could bring.

2010-10-09

I also got an email from one of our Brazilian colleagues today. Diego Norgare was telling me about the upcoming Worldwide Online TechDay that will be running on October 30th. Sessions are running in both Portuguese and also in English.

(Link no longer available)

I was particularly intrigued by the session on liposuction for your database.

2010-10-09

I love the data profiling task that was added to SSIS in SQL Server 2008. It allows you to get a profile of the data in a table - this includes things like what are potential candidate keys, what length are the data values in each column, what percentage of rows in a table are null in each column, what is the distribution of values in the data, etc. etc.

2010-10-06

Every so often, Microsoft sends MVPs a set of MSDN subscriptions that we can give to someone that would benefit from them. I have found it to be very interesting in past years and have to say that the most pleased I ever felt giving these away has been to students who are struggling to get into the workforce for some reason (one with a notable disability comes immediately to mind) or to developers that are just down on their luck for some reason.

2010-09-27

I’ve (fortunately) ended up with a new notebook recently and had to reinstall everything. One problem I ran into was with Master Data Services. The config program seemed happy but it shouldn’t have been. What threw me was that it seemed to have a dependency check for IIS 7, etc. while configuring MDS. That led me to think I’d already configured IIS appropriately. I hadn’t and when I tried to use the site, I got the above error. IIS needed to have the following:

2010-08-23

Another of the free eClinics that we’ve been building for Microsoft was released today. This one was put together by our Australian team with Bill Chesnut as the lead author and provides an introduction to the virtualization of SQL Server and the surrounding tooling.

Enjoy!

2010-08-12

 

I got the super sad news from Adam Machanic tonight that Kent Tegels had passed away. At the time I recorded my last podcast with Kent, he seemed to be getting better.

I cannot begin to express how sad I am about this tonight. The SQL and XML communities are weakened by this loss.

Farewell Kent and thanks for all the fish.

2010-08-03

Together with the folk from Microsoft DPE, my colleagues and I have helped put together a series of free training materials for SQL Server 2008 R2. The presentations from these are now available in bite-sized pieces on the Microsoft Channel 9 site.

You’ll find them here:

https://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/SQL2008R2TrainingKit/

Enjoy!

2010-07-20

Hi Folks,

Just wanted to focus some attention on Arnie Rowland’s project to help unemployed developers to get some software in return for helping a non-profit. Seems like a great idea Arnie!

(link no longer valid)

2010-07-15