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Year: 2008

Steve Jones on Twitter, private Twitter and Yammer

Last Updated November 13, 2008

In the latest Voice of the DBA podcast (love the outtakes at the end, totally awesome), Steve Jones of SQLServerCentral talks about his use of Twitter. Like a lot of folks I know, he’s struggled to find the real-world benefit of it, and I really applaud his honesty. Twitter’s one of those things like MySpace…

Tony Davis disses StackOverflow.com

Last Updated May 17, 2009

How many of you work only with Microsoft SQL Server? No other technologies – not Windows, not IIS, not Visual Studio, not Java, not JQuery, just purely SQL Server and absolutely nothing else? Show of hands? Not too many, I bet. Heck, my job title is SQL Server Expert, but on any given day, I’m…

StackOverflow’s SQL 2008 FTS issue solved

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Whew – the Microsoft folks really came through on this one and tracked down the problem pretty quickly. I want to personally thank Denis Churin, Nikita Shamgunov and Sundaram Narayanan for their detailed investigation into the issue and helping us get it fixed. I’m going to explain the issue to help anybody else get through…

Moved to Michigan and got older

Last Updated November 11, 2008

Home Sweet Home Erika and I drove up to Michigan this weekend and started moving into our family’s house on White Lake near where I grew up. I went to high school near here, and I’m pretty familiar with the rough winters. On our drive up, we drove through freezing rain and snow – Erika’s…

Whoops! The SQL DBA Quiz

Last Updated November 6, 2008

Chris Shaw started a new blog quiz for SQL Server DBAs: name two mistakes you’ve made in your career. I’m glad he restricted it to two entries, or else I’d have had to start a whole separate blog category just for this. Mistake #1: deleting without a where clause. You’ve heard that horror story before,…

Bad storage performance on Amazon EC2 Windows servers

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

This week I presented at the SSWUG Virtual Conference on how to benchmark your storage performance with Microsoft’s SQLIO utility. Last week I talked about running SQL Server in the cloud on Amazon EC2. Take those two things together, and we’ve got storage benchmarking on Amazon EC2 servers: Maximum write speed: 68 MBs/sec Maximum read…

Barack Obama’s campaign let Twitter down

Last Updated April 19, 2009

So it’s the day after a really historic election: the first guy with a Twitter account to be elected as president! What an awesome chance to send 140 characters of hope, change, dreams, opportunity, you name it. It’s so exciting! Me personally, I’d have picked “Yes We Did!” That would have been so cool, and…

Live-blogging the Seattle PASS Summit Keynotes

Last Updated February 13, 2017

#SQLPass, Blogging

Whoa – I’ve hit the big time! I got an email inviting me to be one of a handful of SQL Server industry bloggers who’ll get reserved seating with power and internet access during the PASS Summit keynotes. Awesome! That means I’ll be able to post live updates via my Twitter feed and here on…

Houston Tweet-Up: The Morning After

Last Updated April 19, 2009

Yesterday afternoon, the Houston tweeps converged on Coffee Groundz. I had a great time and got to finally meet some of the folks I’ve Twittered with for months. Photos from around the web: David Harrold’s photos on Flickr ETee’s photos on Flickr SEvatt’s photos on Flickr BrightKite’s Coffee Groundz stream And for your notes, the…

Somebody created a Halloween monster #SQLputdowns

Last Updated June 14, 2019

I think Tim Ford aka SQLAgentMan was the first with this, but now it’s turned into a monster. On Twitter, we’re trading SQL putdowns. You can find ’em on search.twitter.com by searching for #SQLputdowns. Here were my personal favorites from the chatter: Yo mama so dumb she separates statements with STOP. – JCumberland Yo mamma…

Watch a free 10-minute preview of SSWUG videos (update with discount)

Last Updated October 29, 2008

You’ve heard me talk about my SSWUG video conference sessions, but you’re not sure whether it’ll work, or whether it’s worth the money? Well, Chris Shaw and the good folks at SSWUG are giving away free previews to show you how good it looks. You can watch the first ten minute of my SQLIO session…

Before you upgrade to SQL Server 2008…

Last Updated January 10, 2009

This month’s Redmond Mag glows about some new features in SQL 2008, and yes, it does have a lot of cool tricks up its sleeve. But before you go upgrading your servers to get those new features, there’s one thing you need to know. New versions of SQL Server are not always faster for every…

Office in the web + BI in Excel != SSAS DBA jobs

Last Updated October 28, 2008

Add these two things together: SQL Server’s Project Gemini is moving BI into Excel. The next version of Office will be available inside the browser. If that doesn’t scream hosted-BI, I don’t know what does. This is more fuel for Jason Massie’s belief that cloud services will kill the DBA, and I gotta tell you,…

Want to stop Windows from locking your screen?

Last Updated October 28, 2008

I work for a company whose IT department has a group policy enforced so that our screens lock after 10 minutes of inactivity. That’s great in theory, but I run my corporate workstation inside VMware, which means I’m back and forth between different windows all the time. When I go away from my Windows VM…

Getting Started with Amazon EC2 SQL Server 2005

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Sometimes you need an offsite database server in case something goes wrong, but you can’t afford a full-blown disaster recovery datacenter. Or maybe you’ve got some ideas that you’d like to try out with a big SQL Server 2005 box, but you don’t have the hardware sitting around idle. Or maybe you’d just like to…

SQL 2008 upgrade & tuning for StackOverflow.com

Last Updated February 9, 2017

I’ve mentioned Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror.com a few times over the years here, and it bears repeating: he writes a great blog for developers, and DBAs need to read it too. I also follow him on Twitter, and a couple of weeks ago he mentioned he was having problems deciphering execution plans: Holy cow –…

Welcome to the Social…Hell! (My Zune experience)

Last Updated August 24, 2009

I bought a Microsoft Zune 8 to test the new SQLServerPedia video podcasts and the user experience was so unpolished, so unprofessional that I just had to bang out a blog about it. Looking at the iPod Nano next to the Zune 8, I could never understand why somebody would buy the Zune 8. Now…

SQL Server 2008 Management Studio: Group Execute

Last Updated January 10, 2009

I’m going to show how to use a new feature in SQL Server 2008 Management Studio: the ability to query groups of servers simultaneously. In Registered Servers, right-click on a group of servers and click New Query. What comes up will look like a normal query window, but pay close attention to the very bottom…

Amazon EC2 Windows support now live!

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

You can now spin up a virtual server in Amazon’s datacenter with Windows running. Even better, you can spin up a fresh new SQL Server for around $1 per hour. Amazon Web Services Blog announcement on Windows support Amazon EC2 description with Windows and SQL Server pricing And of course, this comes on a day…

Being the Porsche of job candidates

Last Updated August 3, 2018

Professional Development

Stephen Wynkoop blogged about social networking as a part of the hiring process. I’ll sum it up in a line: like it or not, you are being Googled when you submit your resume. Get over it. Would you buy a car without searching for an online review? Sure, some people do – otherwise the dismal…