I ordered a 512 GB SSD so that I can get great performance running Windows 8.1. I’ll have all of my spinning drives intact, so I’m not worried about actual data loss. The concern is in preserving things like IE favorites for every family member. The User State Migration Tool (USMT) has ScanState.exe to capture what you want to preserve and ...

It’s easy to find what calls a stored procedure in SQL Server. Finding where it is called outside of SQL Server is an entirely different matter. I use great free utilities for either use case. Of course, you can use built-in features in SSMS to find out what calls a stored procedure, for example. Select an object in the Object Explorer, ...

When you are dealing with the United States federal government, accessibility isn’t a nice to have, it is the law. As I was researching the law, I came across a related item, the Bond (as in 007) rule, which was proposed by Sidney Smith in the journal Human Factors in 1977. The federal government has an entire website section508.gov describing ...

SQL Server 2012 simplifies the processing of unstructured data found in files. The FileTable enhancements to FILESTREAM allow documents to be known to SQL Server full-text search by simply copying them to a FileTable network share. This is much more convenient than it was in SQL Server 2008 R2 where the files had to be explicitly loaded into SQL ...

While researching an upcoming blog post on using SQL Server 2012 FileTable, I stumbled across Project Tuva. Bill Gates bought the rights to some of Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman’s physics lectures and made them available for free at http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/. Speaking of recorded lectures, I highly recommend that students ...

The International Classifications of Diseases (ICD) is a global standard administered and copyrighted by the World Health Organization (WHO). The 10th revision, ICD-10 is the current revision. Some countries adapt the WHO standard. In the United States, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) has made two modifications to ICD-10 known as ...

MUMPS is a NoSQL database and programming language that does not receive widespread attention. I searched for lists of the most important or most used NoSQL databases and MUMPS did not make the lists, although it should. The Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System, often referred to as just M, is a key-value database that ...

If you can't reach the HHS site, you can use the link I provided above to Bing's cached copy.

Many people have asked me various questions about Personal Health Information (PHI) which is covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA, not HIPPA). The process of removing data (de-identification or anonymization) that could violate someone’s privacy is  complex. This is particularly true when there is ...

My current client does a really great job at ensuring enterprise stability, best client I've ever seen at this. It's against policy to install anything without first having an archival copy safely stored in the corporate software repository. There are always able to restore or rebuild a machine to any specific state. How about using Windows ...