Pure success! I could simply stop here. However, I want to mention again everybody involved in this, and also some who were unfortunately missing. First of all, PASS is the organization that defined SQL Saturdays. And apparently the idea works I have to thank again to all of the speakers. Coming to share your amazing knowledge is something we ...

I recently posted a blog entry on how cloud computing would change the Systems Architect’s role in an organization. In a way, the Systems Architect has the easiest transition to a new way of using computing technologies. In fact, that’s actually part of the job description. I mentioned that a Systems Architect has three primary ...

A new term - well, perhaps not that new - has come up and I’m actually very excited about it. The term is Data Scientist, and since it’s new, it’s fairly undefined. I’ll explain what I think it means, and why I’m excited about it. In general, I’ve found the term deals at its most basic with analyzing data. Of course, we all do that, and the term ...

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 ...

This is one in a series of posts on when and where to use a distributed architecture design in your organization's computing needs. You can find the main post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx Description: On-premise data will be a part of computing for quite some time – ...

I've been reading a fascinating article about the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC facility. It's a scientific research facility that houses a particle collider, which generates an incredible amount of data. Their original plan was to stream the data to tape, then sending the data to ''islands'' closer to the users, offloading the network as quickly ...

I'm looking over some data retention strategy documents for a company, I noticed that they want to keep some data ''forever''. Now, beyond the quibble of determining how to store something for eternity, how permanent can data really be? There are atomic (n, not ACID, atomic) ways of storing binary representations, but will the interpretation of ...

I read a very interesting (and lengthy) article yesterday from Reuter’s (you can find the whole thing here) in which the author goes into some detail about people in the government that are self-described “data dogs”. I find it an interesting study in general, since I also value data as well – but the article finally seems to land on a topic that ...