December 2009 - Posts

• [OT] Auto-Responders: Making E-Mail Suck, One Reply at a Time

  Do either of these look familiar: "Suzanne is out of the office and will return December 12." "Hi! I'm on vacation, and may not have access to e-mail. If you need immediate assistance, please contact ..." Or how about this one (seen in December): "I'm Read More... Posted Thursday, December 31, 2009 4:12 PM by Adam Machanic | 25 Comments Filed under: auto-responders, e-mail, vacation messages

• Improving Your Public Speaking: "Confessions of a Public Speaker"

  Speaking is one of those activities where there is always something to tweak or improve. Whether you've just finished your first talk or your thousandth, after you're done I guarantee you'll look back and find at least a couple of things that you'll wish Read More... Posted Wednesday, December 30, 2009 1:43 PM by Adam Machanic | 8 Comments Filed under: books, public speaking

• Spam Fighting and Lessons Learned

  Here on SQLblog, we take spam seriously. Actually, I should rephrase that: I take spam really, really, really seriously, some other people take spam somewhat seriously, and some don't really seem to care. It all balances out in the end. We've done a pretty Read More... Posted Wednesday, December 16, 2009 12:01 PM by Adam Machanic | 14 Comments Filed under: lessons, spam, SQLblog

• T-SQL Tuesday #001 (Date/Time Tricks): The Roundup

  Wow! The response to the first T-SQL Tuesday was truly amazing. We ended up with 20 great posts, from all over the world. If you didn’t participate this time, fear not—we’ll be doing this every month from now on so there is plenty of time to jump in. Read More... Posted Wednesday, December 09, 2009 8:00 AM by Adam Machanic | 33 Comments

• T-SQL Tuesday #001: Exploring "Fuzzy" Interval Islands Using SQLCLR

  When working with time intervals, we often want to ask a couple of basic questions: Which time periods are not covered by our intervals? These are known as "gaps". What are the time ranges that we are fully covering? These are known as "islands". If you're Read More... Posted Tuesday, December 08, 2009 3:13 PM by Adam Machanic | 4 Comments Filed under: date, datetime, gaps, islands, Performance, SQLCLR, time, T-SQL Tuesday Attachment(s): AdamMachanic_TSQLTuesday_ActiveProducts.zip

• New England Data Camp v2.0 (SQL Saturday #34) - January 30, Waltham MA - Registration and Call for Speakers Open

  Last week I very quietly announced, via Twitter, that we've officially launched the site for New England Data Camp v2.0 , the second go at a full-day event jointly hosted by both the New England SQL Server Users Group and the Southern New England SQL Read More... Posted Monday, December 07, 2009 10:59 AM by Adam Machanic | 2 Comments Filed under: data camp, New England, sql saturday

• Who is Active? v9.57: Fast, Comprehensive DMV Collection - What's Really Happening on Your Server?

  UPDATE, April 28 2011: Who is Active v9.57 is outdated. Please use v11.00 instead. Happy December, SQLblog readers! My gift to you, just in time for the holidays: The newest "official" release of your favorite SQL Server activity monitoring stored procedure Read More... Posted Thursday, December 03, 2009 3:59 PM by Adam Machanic | 39 Comments Filed under: DMVs, monitoring, Performance, Scripts, who is active