If you’re holding a special event, such as a SQL Saturday or a user group, one of the challenges is to get speakers for the event. Now, the best speakers come from the community – people who use the product day-in, day-out. They have a wealth of expertise, and many of them are really great presenters. But from time to time you might want to get a ...

Woo hoo! There's another MSDN Roadshow coming to town 3 Mar 2010! G. Andrew Duthie (Blog - @devhammer) is co-presenting a 4-hour session on Azure and Windows 7 (among other topics) with David Isbitski (Blog - @thedavedev). I plan to be there! :{> Andy

Right now it’s tough to get businesses to loosen the purse a little and get you out to some training. But you have features in the product that you’re not even able to use because you haven’t been trained. What’s a Data Professional to do? Why, go to free or low cost training over the web, of course! And we’ve got you covered. Here’s the scoop: ...

My friend Brent Ozar, who is a top-notch SQL Server Professional, mentioned on his blog (http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2007/04/sql-server-health-check/comment-page-1/#comment-17520) that he brought in Microsoft Support to do a “Health Check”. There were some questions about what this actually entails – so I thought I would post that description ...

Microsoft is a big company – and of course we have a lot of IT infrastructure that we have to manage. It might surprise you to learn that we have an IT group, just like at your company. We have a networking team, a server hardware team, software teams, DBA’s, the whole bit. In fact, we have more Mac computers than just about anyone (other than ...

Kentucky has launched their Microsoft ''Elevate America'' website at https://kyelevateamerica.ky.gov/. Kentucky residents can register for free Microsoft training and certification at this link through the Commonwealth's Office of Employment and Training.  Their website indicates about 20,250 vouchers are currently available and they're ...

I've been asked to explain three major events that brought me to where I am today. That's a tall order for me, since I view everything as a continuum of multiple small events. But there are some ''seminal'' events that tend to either show or dictate a further direction, so in the context of working with technology in general and SQL Server in ...

Most data professionals I’ve met work in two modes: we plan for our day, and we react to the situations around us. I’m staring at my list of things that I need to do today right now, which is my planned work. Of course, I have no idea how much of that will really get done – it’s optimistic to be sure. On the other hand I have several systems I ...

As the Data Professional in your organization, the rest of the org looks to you to ensure that the system can handle what the business requires. To do that, you need to know two things: what the business requires, and what SQL Server can do. But of course there’s a bit more to it than that. Knowing the business side of the requirements – well, I ...

Many Data Professionals I deal with work with more than just SQL Server. I came from a background of COBOL flat-file databases, worked with Oracle, DB/2, Ingres, and lots of other databases as well. While I find that the SQL Server professionals I know are fine with learning a new platform, many times I’ve run into folks on other platforms that ...