Thanks to everyone who attended my ''Sell Yourself!'' presentation at SQLSaturday #61 in Washington, D.C., and thanks to NOVA SQL for setting up the event! I'm uploading the presentation deck here in PDF, original length, with new materials (I had to cut some slides out due to time limits).  This deck includes a new section on ...

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday post is about LOB data http://sqlblog.com/blogs/michael_coles/archive/2010/05/03/t-sql-tuesday-006-what-about-blob.aspx.   For this one I decided to post a sample Tiger/Line SQL database I use all the time in live demos. For those who aren't familiar with it, Tiger/Line data is a dataset published by the U.S. ...

New Jersey SQL Server User Group (NJSQL) is bringing SQLSaturday #39 to NYC on April 24, 2010!  The free all-day training event will be hosted by Microsoft at their Midtown Manhattan offices.  The speaker line-up is growing fast—if you'd like to present, visit the event's open call for speakers.  This is a free full-day ...

A common question on the newsgroups is ''how do you encrypt data in a .NET [or other] client application and then decrypt it on SQL Server [or vice versa]?'' I actually ran down my list of answers to someone who asked this in the newsgroups a few weeks ago. I won’t get into the details, but the answers all pretty much say the same thing -- ...

I just got tagged by my old friend Jacob Sebastian at Beyond Relational, and it turns out it's my turn to explain how I became such a geek :) Way back in the day I got my start on the TRS-80 Model III (affectionately known as the ''Trash-80s''), a nice little Z-80 based desktop computer with an 80x25 monochrome screen and a whopping ...

It's well-known by now that SQL Server 2005 and 2008 include new encryption-related statements that allow you to create and administer encryption keys. You can use CREATE CERTIFICATE to create or import a certificate or DROP ASYMMETRIC KEY to remove an asymmetric key from the database, for instance.  One of the interesting ommissions ...