I’m really pleased to see that Nathan Pitcher and the gang in New Zealand have organised a PASS Community Connection event. It will run in Porirua (same place as their last SQL Code Camp) on December 6th / 7th. I’ll be there to deliver a few sessions and the keynote along with Adam Cogan. Peter Ward, Chris Auld, Daryl Burling, Dave Dustin, Duncan Murch, Myles Matheson and Bruce Cassidy are also all doing sessions. It should be a great weekend.
2008-10-24
I’m encouraging people to update Books Online on a regular basis. The August version for 2008 has hit the download sites today. You can get it here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/cc514207.aspx
2008-10-01
When I’ve been doing sessions around the world on DataDude (Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals), the main feedback I’ve had is “great product but pity we’ll never get to use it because of the licensing”.
Sanity has finally prevailed. In today’s PressPass announcement, while there’s interesting news on product naming (Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0), there’s great news that the developer and database professional editions will merge and in the meantime, people licensing the developer edition will now get DataDude as well. (and vice versa). This is a big step forward for the product.
2008-09-30
Hi Folks,
I recently wrote a chapter in the new eBook “Introducing SQL Server 2008” at MSPress. Peter DeBetta was the main author and Mark Whitehorn also wrote. It’s now available.
And it’s free !
Enjoy.
(PS: I’ve had a few people ask how you read it. It downloads with a cfm file extension for some bizarre reason. It is a pdf. Just rename it to be one and you should be fine).
2008-09-17
Well, TechEd in Australia and New Zealand have come and gone again already this year. Congrats to the content owners Andrew Coates and Darryl Burling for their efforts again this year and for organising good shows.
I had a really busy week as I was teaching a SQL 2k8 for developers precon on Monday and Tuesday, then had to travel to New Zealand on Tuesday night, just for the day. I got into the hotel about 1am, woke up and did my session at 10:45, another one at 2:20pm and then raced out of the venue into a cab and back to the airport to go back to Sydney. I did my session at TechEd Australia on Thursday.
2008-09-14
Hi Folks,
The summit program committee have confirmed I’ll be doing two sessions at the PASS Summit in Seattle in November. I’ve got upgraded versions of both “Avoiding Stored Proc Recompiles” and “A SQL Server DBA’s Guide To CLR Integration” to cover SQL 2k8 changes. The first session also has a little more time allocated as a spotlight session.
I’m really looking forward to the summit this year and hope to see you all there. Summit details are at the summit site.
2008-09-10
Fellow RD and colleague Ken Spencer posted a little while back that he was having good success loading VPC images off flash drives. I thought it was time to try it myself.
The first concept is that not all flash drives are created equal. I went and found fast ones. I ended up with Corsair Flash Voyager GT drives in 16G, which was just big enough to hold the VPC images I was working with. These are extra fast drives that have matched controllers and memory and are rated up to 34 MB/sec. In Australia, they are $119 AUD but I’ve seen them on US sites for about $63 USD recently.
2008-08-30
SQL Down Under show 39 featuring Kent Tegels is now available for download from www.sqldownunder.com .
In the show, Kent discusses the spatial data type in SQL Server 2008.
2008-08-30
You’ve seen the Olympic torch relay. Well PDC has a brain relay with the PDCnoggin. The Regional Directors are an awesome bunch of people that I’m really honoured to be part of. Many get together for the PDC each time it’s held. Our RD lead Kevin Schuler sent me the PDCnoggin to start the relay, probably because I’m about as far away as it can start.
And now it’s on it’s way to the next RD before it makes its way to the PDC in October in LA.
2008-08-29
I fell for this one this week. If you execute the following code in SQLCMD mode, what would you expect the output to be?
:SETVAR PrincipalServer WINSTD2K8BASE
:SETVAR MirrorServer WINSTD2K8BASE\SQLDEV02
:SETVAR WitnessServer WINSTD2K8BASE\SQLDEV03
:CONNECT $(PrincipalServer)
SELECT @@SERVERNAME;
:CONNECT $(MirrorServer)
SELECT @@SERVERNAME;
:CONNECT $(WitnessServer)
SELECT @@SERVERNAME;
I’m guessing you might not have expected:
WINSTD2K8BASE\SQLDEV03
WINSTD2K8BASE\SQLDEV03
WINSTD2K8BASE\SQLDEV03
The problem is the lack of a batch separator. What I should have written was this:
2008-08-29
