I read Jeffery Hicks’ article in this month’s Redmond Magazine on a new add-in for Windows PowerShell 2.0. It’s called the PowerShell Pack and it has a some great new features that I plan to put into place on my production systems as soon as I finished learning and testing them. You can download the pack here if you have PowerShell 2.0. I’m ...

I’m writing a series of articles on how to migrate “departmental” data into SQL Server. I also hold workshops on the entire process – from discovering that the data exists to the modeling process and then how to design the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) process. Finally I write about (and teach) a few methods on actually moving the data. One ...

I have a presentation that I give on SQL Server Consolidation Strategies, and in that presentation I talk about a few links that are useful. Here are some that I’ve found – feel free to comment on more, or if these links go stale:   Consolidation using SQL Server: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee692366.aspx ...

A good friend of mine years ago showed me this web site: http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/. I took my lunch hour each day for a week or so and read each “page” on this site. It deals with computer technology history in a way that I had never read before. As I study each new trend in computer and database technology, I still find this site to ...

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: ...

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 ...

It seems the more things change the more they stay the same. One of the things I used to create on the mainframe system when I started years ago was a “charge-back” system.  It tracked the time and resources used by the employees so that we could charge their department money for the time they spent on the (very expensive) mainframe. When ...

Many data professionals deal in the storage, retrieval and display of data from a central set of systems. But there is another side to our craft, and I think it’s the most rewarding part of the job for both the professional and the organization they serve. Data, in and of itself, isn’t very interesting. It’s when that data gains meaning that ...

I'm still re-reading the ''Fourth Paradigm'' book by Microsoft Research, and one section continues to intrigues me. There's a part where the book explains database design, and puts forth that the most important thing when you're designing large data sets is to find out the ''Top Twenty Questions'' the database has to answer. The quote is ...

Licensing. Sometimes it feels like to you need a specialized degree, a black robe and a secret handshake to really understand it – but it’s not quite that bad. There are several licensing “models”, from just buying SQL Server off the shelf to Software Assurance, or SA, where you just install to your heart’s content and then “true up” or pay at ...