In high school, my dad's side of the family had a restaurant and bar in Whitehall, Michigan. The Galleon was a high-end (well, for the local price range, anyway) seafood and steak restaurant on the shores of White Lake, and we catered to the tourists and well-off locals with a taste for the finer things. ...
Last week I posted a picture on Twitter of the two books I'm reviewing right now: Tom LaRock's DBA Survivor and Bert Scalzo's Introduction to Oracle. They're both 100-level books. People didn't seem to question the former (perhaps because Tom's a friend of mine) but I got a lot of comments about the ...
Paul Randal (Blog - @PaulRandal) tagged me in a post about the three events that brought him here. I had to think about this one for a while, and I even talked it over with Erika. Discovering BBSes
David Allen's productivity book, Getting Things Done, has made me a better person. After using its methods for years, I'm even more convinced it can help anybody in IT. Today, I'm going to explain how I worked before GTD, ...
In the 1980s, Nancy Reagan attempted to solve our nation's drug problem by encouraging kids to "Just Say No" if they were offered drugs. According to my research performed ...
A few months back, Microsoft gave MVPs a few MSDN Ultimate subscriptions to pass on to community members, no strings attached. I quietly gave mine to a few deserving folks who I thought could be future MVPs, but Arnie Rowland (Blog – @ArnieRowland) had a better idea. Arnie’s Project Phoenix encourages developers to propose a [...]
Read More »A few months ago, I had The Idea. I wanted to conduct SQL Server training on a cruise ship. I emailed a few buddies and offered to start a company called SQLCruise with them, and out of three friends, only one could say yes. I don’t have anything against the two who said no. I [...]
Read More »Most SQL Server DBAs don’t even like MySQL, let alone NoSQL. They cringe when they hear people say things like, “I don’t need transactions” or “The data will eventually be consistent” or “Indexes will be supported in the next version.” SQL Server and Oracle people are constantly trying to out-feature each other, and the abject [...]
Read More »In August 2008, Lady Gaga released her premier album The Fame. This 13-track work produced several hit singles including Just Dance, Poker Face, and Paparazzi – but it also produced plenty of controversy. Her exaggerated use of fashion, musical cliches, and sex gave her plenty of media attention – both good and bad. If you’ve [...]
Read More »Pop quiz: should you be worried if your SQL Server’s page life expectancy is averaging 214? There’s only one correct answer: it depends.
Performance tuning is all about finding the RIGHT bottleneck, focusing on it, and fixing it to the application owner’s satisfaction. Learn what happens if you don’t do it right.
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