I recently did a Rick Review of the Day 3 Keynote from the 2008 PASS Community Summit that featured Dr. DeWitt speaking on new technology that ended up in the Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) edition of SQL Server 2008 R2.  I decided to also listen again to the Day 3 Keynote from the 2001 PASS Community Summit.  While I listened intently to ...

Am I stuck in the past?  Not really, but I like to blog about the recordings that I have recently watched.  There are a lot of recordings out there on the PASS website and other places.  Recently I have had the good fortune of exploring some of the neat technology behind the Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) in SQL Server 2008 ...

I ran across this recording about 3 months ago.  It is a recording that is open to everyone.  It was recorded at SQLBits 7 with Christian Bolton as the speaker for a session entitled: ''Consolidating data collection with SQLDIAG and analysing it all with SQLNexus''.  I found it very informative and hope that you will ...

I recently got my DVD set from the PASS 2011 Summit and started to look through all of the sessions that I missed.  Wow!  I can't wait to go through all of these!  It will take me a while. Since this is a new year and many people are often greeted with new challenges (like a new server to manage), I decided that this session would ...

I do a lot of public speaking over the course of the year at many different conferences and events. I always try to carve out time during and after the presentation to take questions from the audience. While many of these questions are de riguer, I often get questions that can only be described as ''How do I handle this ... <insert IT horror ...

Last week Microsoft announced several new offerings for “Big Data” - and since I’m a stickler for definitions, I wanted to make sure I understood what that really means. What is “Big Data”? What size hard drive is that? After all, my laptop has 1TB of storage - is my laptop “Big Data”? There are actually a few definitions for this term, most ...

First things first, Wayne Snyder is rolling off the board of directors for PASS this year. We'd worked together, shoulder to shoulder along with Joe Webb (blog | @joewebb) and other outstanding members of the SQL Server community, for many years of on the PASS board of directors and I'm certain that my tenure on the board and as president of the ...

I've already had a few good days in Seattle/Redmond this week, meeting with the Microsoft SQL Server program teams and with other Microsoft SQL Server MVPs. I was as excited as a squeeling Justin Beiber fangirl waiting for his new video, wishing I could tell you all of the cool things I learned at Redmond about the future of SQL Server. But as ...

As I alluded to in my blog series on ''What to expect at the 2001 PASS Community Summit'', the SQL Clinic will once again be in full swing.  See the following blog post on how to best be prepared to get your question answered.  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/archive/2011/09/19/inside-the-sql-server-clinic.aspx  

As I finish up preparing for the Sep 20 (@1pm ET) webcast, I thought a final blog post may be appropriate in order to quickly reference many of the areas that I have touched upon.  Naturally, much of this information is geared towards First Timers, but Alumni are welcome to join in the webcast as well and are encouraged to help spread even ...