One of the types of question you get after speaking at a conference about virtualization, like I did at the 2012 PASS Summit with my buddy David Klee (Twitter | Blog), might go down like this:''Is SQL Server version X supported on hypervisor platform Q?'' or something even more specific like ''Is SQL Server 2012 supported on VMWare ...

I have two new articles up on Database Trends & Applications magazine.  I'd love to get your thoughts and feedback!Welcome to the Weird, Wild World of SQL Server LicensingNot long in the past, SQL Server licensing was an easy and straightforward process. You used to take one of a few paths to get your SQL Server licenses. The first ...

Back when my day-to-day duties included database administration work and enterprise architecture, I became rather obsessed with the idea of operational excellence. I read everything I could on the topic. I made a list of favorites, which became somewhat shabby over time, as I dog-eared important pages and scribbled notes in the margins. ...

Hot off the virtual press, the SQL Server Separation of Duties Whitepaper is now available!  SQL Server 2008 R2 provides the full breadth of tools to support restrictive compliance and security requirements. This whitepaper will associate the features and options available in SQL Server 2008 R2 to meet the varying separation of duties ...

Have you ever heard of these types of requests?  True story! I have had each of these and many more: A customer needed to grant a business user the rights to issue a KILL command – without giving them sysadmin or CONTROL SERVER.  A customer wanted to grant a user the rights to update a job – just one job – without any other ...

The Enterprise Policy Management Framework version 3.0, a new version of the framework to support policy automated policy evaluation for SQL Server 2000 and 2005, has been posted to codeplex. For those who are not familiar with the tool, the Enterprise Policy Management Framework is a reporting solution on the state of the SQL Server enterprise ...

This past week I was delivering some events for customers on supporting Mission Critical databases with SQL Server 2008.  During the compliance conversation I mentioned that there were a couple of new resources available related specifically to PCI compliance.  Parente Randolph published a whitepaper on how to leverage SQL Server 2008 ...

This week Thales announced that their nCipher product line now integrates with SQL Server 2008 EKM.  This announcement follows SafeNet as our second vendor to support EKM. 

For some, the answer is easy.  Since Tibor reminded me several months ago that <> == standard and != <> standard (and yes, I used that notation on purpose), I have been making a conscious effort to use only <> going forward.  Similarly, I have tried to avoid GETDATE() in favor of CURRENT_TIMESTAMP.  (Of course this ...