Introduction I was tagged by Joe Webb for this question circulating through the inter-tubes. Joe and I shared a cab to the airport after the PASS Summit 2008. If you've never had the opportunity to share a cab with Joe, I highly recommend it. He's one of those people. You know the type - they talk to you for a few minutes and ...

At PASS this year, Adam Machanic and Peter DeBetta gave a great session presenting things as sort of ''anti-patterns''. They would have slides that have would say things like ''Naming standards are irrelevant'' or ''always use heaps''. It was a blast. The audience chimed in with equally bad ideas (including myself). Kudos guys! What really struck ...

Introduction ''Hey Andy? What happened to your Day One post?'' Excellent question. I was going to post a Day One post - really I was - but I got side-tracked. I won't mention any names, but I will blame the major offenders by their Twitter handles: @BrentO, @sqlagentman, and @SqlBatman. These gentlemen forced me - through coercion and peer ...

No one panic - I'm still a Solid Quality Mentor. :) I am honored to accept the responsibilities of PASS Regional Mentor for the US Southeast! What does this mean? Well, I get to work with SQL Server User Groups and PASS chapters from Texas to North Carolina. If you're interested in starting a SQL Server Users Group - regardless of ...

So I generally speak at PASS every year. Unless I've offended the powers that be, I will again. So, I have an open question to colleagues and readers and those that have come to my sessions - what would you like to know more about? Perhaps everyone could use this post as a way to decide on topics. PASS is a very user-group oriented conference ...

I recently saw a post on one of the MCT forums asking which conference should be attended - TechEd IT Pro, TechEd Dev or PASS when it comes to SQL education. I posted a reply there favoring TechEd (either). I need to defend that a bit better. One reply to that post pointed out that SQL Server is considered ITPro by MS when it come to ...

I have already given a rundown of most everything PASS here on my personal blog, including a series of posts with pictures too over the days of PASS) but since this blog is all about things technical with SQL Server, I wanted to just rundown of some of the cool stuff I learned about SQL Server 2008 that I hadn't heard before... You can ...