Louis Davidson : Writing

Why We Write #5–An Interview With Jason Strate

drsql — Mon, 20 May 2013 02:40:59 GMT

My next guest is a person I have known for years, and have worked with on several occasions, Jason Strate ( @stratesql ). Jason is a very active writer and speaker (at my first SQL Saturday event, he spoke four times!), and always seems very busy. His...(read more)

Why We Write #4 - An Interview With Doug Lane

drsql — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 02:56:22 GMT

My next guest is Doug Lane , who has been blogging for the past few years on his website: http://www.douglane.net/ . Doug is also a speaker who has spoken at SQL Saturdays as well as the SQL PASS Summit , and as I write these interview questions was on...(read more)

Why We Write #3 - An Interview With Rob Farley

drsql — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 17:04:14 GMT

In the third entry in this series, we take a turn south, not in quality, but in the geography of our next entrant. Rather our interview target is Rob Farley, who is from (well lives in) Australia. Rob Farley is a SQL Server MVP, and is quite a busy...(read more)

Why We Write #2 - An Interview With Mark Vaillancourt

drsql — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:30:12 GMT

My second guest is Mark Vaillancourt (whose last name makes me very happy for the copy and paste feature), who is an Information Management consultant working for Digineer , and is a Regional Mentor for PASS in Canada. Mark is also a speaker at SQL Saturday...(read more)

Why We Write #1 - An Interview With Thomas LaRock

drsql — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:03:00 GMT

I 've been a writer of trade level technical materials for over 13 years now, writing books, articles, blogs, and even tweets for a variety of outlets, almost exclusively about Microsoft SQL Server. While I won't claim to be the best writer in the world,...(read more)

Pro SQL Server 2012 Practices Chapter 8: Release Management Review

drsql — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 21:06:14 GMT

This past year, I contributed a chapter to an anthology book of best practices for working with SQL Server 2012 entitled Pro SQL Server 2012 Practices ( http://www.apress.com/9781430247708 ). As authors, for publicity we decided to do summary reviews...(read more)

A wee bit exhausted… time to reenergize

drsql — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 02:26:00 GMT

I admit it. I am tired and I have not blogged nearly enough. This has been a crazy year, with the book I finished writing , the pre-cons I have done (teaching is NOT my primary profession so I do a lot more prep than some others probably do), lots of...(read more)

Chapter 8–Patterns and Anti-Patterns

drsql — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 17:29:42 GMT

In this last kind of “creative” chapter, I will look at some of the ways you implement common problems in your relational database, and some of the ways you probably shouldn’t. The “should” sections will deal with: Uniqueness – Beyond the simple uniqueness...(read more)

Chapter 7–Enforced Data Protection

drsql — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 04:36:13 GMT

As the book progresses, I find myself veering from the original stated outline quite a bit, because as I teach about this more (and I am teaching a daylong db design class in August at http://www.sqlsolstice.com/ … shameless plug, but it is on topic :)...(read more)

Normalization and How to Know When You Are Done… The short version…

drsql — Sun, 29 May 2011 20:54:15 GMT

A while back, I was working on a short article about Normalization for a book that never got published (admittedly I wasn’t getting paid for the article, and it wasn’t for charity, so I wasn’t that broken up over it.) The task at hand was to, in...(read more)

Chapters Two, Three, and Four

drsql — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 04:21:39 GMT

I am trying to blog all of the chapters of the book, but due to deadlines and a lot of shuffling about, I never got around it for these three chapters, two of which I have added since I wrote the original table of contents. All of these contain mostly...(read more)

Design Book–Dimensional or No Dimensional, that is..the question

drsql — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 02:29:31 GMT

So, it is right there in the title of the book “Relational Database Design” etc (the title is kinda long :) But as I consider what to cover and, conversely, what not to cover, dimensional design inevitably pops up. So I am considering including...(read more)

Design Book– First Section (Skills)

drsql — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 03:04:23 GMT

One of the main things that I haven’t always loved about the previous books is that it wasn’t a perfect reference book. I focused on having a flow throughout the book that, not unlike a school class, started at the beginning and finished at the end. Interspersed...(read more)

Design Book–Top level outline

drsql — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 04:10:12 GMT

The more I teach sessions about database design, the more I realize that two things are true. First, most people don’t dig the normalization stuff as much as I do (some do), and second, people really need the normalization stuff more than they think....(read more)

Sixth pillar – Well Performing

drsql — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:57:31 GMT

I guess eventually I had to admit that performance matters. Whenever I speak, and in all of my books, I try to stress over and over that performance is NOT the only thing. The fact is all too much time is spent trying to make database applications run...(read more)