Comments on: Upcoming Free Training Events

By: Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:44:01 +0000

Hi! Sorry it was so tough to find that date – I’ve passed this on to our team to get that addressed. Thanks for the feedback!

By: Malathi Mahadevan

Malathi Mahadevan — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:40:32 +0000

I registered for this..am sure it will be as great as the vcon last year. One odd logistic quirk though that i must mention – I got two emails one confirming i registerd and the other with userid,password and link. None of them had a conference date on it. Now being a busy dba i just registed assuming the date would come on the email and funny nothing was there. Went to quest website (home page), again some more conferences but no mention of this. I figured i’d find it on Brent’s blog..sure i did. Thanks, and if you can pass that on please do so. What would a person do with a confirmation with no date on it?

By: Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:04:53 +0000

You’re welcome! I know what you mean about the CTE moment-of-clarity stuff. I didn’t get the hype either, and I just saw it as useful for the first time a few weeks ago! Funny coincidence. I still haven’t actually used one in the wild though.

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:00:02 +0000

Hi Brent,
My real name is Peter – I used something else because I was at work and probably wearing my tinfoil hat – please excuse me for that, old habits die hard.
Thanks for the welcome!
I appreciate the very helpful reply. It was interesting to discover you don’t have a degree either. I started working as a programmer at a very young age (17) so I never really saw a reason to go to college at the time, seeing that I already had the job I wanted. I did actually enroll and started taking classes but then dropped out. I think maybe just in order not be filtered by HRs, I could enroll in one of those online college degree things and be a “paper bachelor”
I have an MSDN license via my employer so I’ll take a look at the Development Edition – I currently have SSMS installed and have been playing with it and doing the exercises from SQL Queries for Mere Mortals. I’ll work on interfacing with SQL Server using C#/VB.Net also. (When I said I was a C programmer I really meant C – we were doing things where speed was essential )
And yes I had already read your article on certs but I wondered if the “experience” you mentioned was only SQL- or Database-related experience or if, in the case of a developer position, having non-database programming experience also counted. I’m glad to know it does.
From all your articles and videos you always come out as a very approachable, down-to-earth and immensely helpful guy. I really enjoy your blog and will become a regular here. I’m more of a lurker but I’ll say hi every now and again. Thank you again for all the work you put into this all – I can’t describe how much I appreciate it.
P.S.: I just had my CTE moment of clarity a few moments ago (while reading about it). I wasn’t foreign to recursion but for a newcomer it’s confusing to understand the use of a non-recursive CTE. Most material out there are not for people coming from a non-database programming background I guess, so it was difficult to understand the hype behind this brand new thing (for SS 2005) when used for non-recursive purposes. I guess that’s why I’m reading T-SQL Fundamentals.