Mai and I got back from New Zealand last night after attending the PASS Community Connection event in Porirua (near Wellington) in New Zealand.
It was a fun weekend as always and congratulations need to go to Nathan Pitcher (PASS Chapter leader from Dunedin) for organising it in conjunction with Adrian, Dave, Amanda, Sue and all the gang from the other local chapters as well as the staff of the local polytechnic where the event was held.
2008-12-08
At the PASS Summit in Seattle this year, I had the pleasure of meeting Ola Hallengren. I’ve exchanged emails with him previously and I do want to highlight the tool he provides for SQL Server backup, integrity check and index optimization. You’ll find details on it at:
2008-12-01
I’ve just posted the interview I did with Buck Woody live at the SQL PASS Summit in Seattle recently. In it, Buck talks about roles within the SQL Server product group and then discusses Powershell in relation to SQL Server. It’s available for download from https://sqldownunder.com .
Enjoy!
2008-12-01
I’ve been really busy lately. A big component of that time has been my involvement with the new Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server 2008 program. I was privileged to be chosen to teach six days of the fifteen day program in the recent alpha rotation. In addition, I decided to attend (and pay !) to attend the rotation, do the exams and qualifying lab.
Well it was quite an experience!
2008-11-28
Another project that Ron Talmage and several other of my colleagues have been working on is a new system views poster for SQL Server 2008. I’m told that it’s going to go out with the December issue of SQL Server Magazine.
I got a copy of this at the PASS summit and it’s excellent. In fact, stocks ran out before the conference even really got started.
Congratulations to all involved.
2008-11-28
I’ve been working on the SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Technical Reference with a number of my colleagues (Ron Talmage, Aaron Johal, Steven Abraham, Allan Hirt, Herbert Albert, Antonio Soto, Joe Webb, Craig Utley, Dejan Sarka, Larry Barnes, Pablo Ahumada, Kathy Blomstrom) and a bunch of great folk from Microsoft (Arvind Rao, George Huey, Richard Waymire, Siva Harinath, Edward Melomed, Deepika Mistry, Fernando Caro, Goldie Chaudhuri, Max Verun, Vijay Tandra Sistla, Tom Michaels, Justin Erickson, Devendra Tiwari, Jingwei Lu, Fernando Azpeitia Lopez, Ketan Duvedi, Lukasz Pawlowski, David Noor, Matt Masson, Karandeep Anand, Jen Witsoe, Suzanne Bonney, Megan Bradley, Tresy Kilbourne, Bronwyn McNutt).
2008-11-28
I’m so glad to see that my colleague Itzik Ben-Gan has his T-SQL Fundamentals book now available. This book has been needed for some time. It’s been updated for SQL Server 2008 and I’m sure it’ll fast become one of the standard SQL Server 2008 references.
Details are here: http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft%C2%AE-Server%C2%AE-T-SQL-Fundamentals-PRO-Developer/dp/0735626014/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225597357&sr=8-1
The companion web site for the book is here: http://www.insidetsql.com/tsqlfund2008/
2008-11-02
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
