In May, I’ll be in the US. I have board meetings for PASS at the SQLRally event in Dallas, and then I’m going to be spending a bit of time in Chicago. The big news is that while I’m in Chicago (May 14-16), I’m going to teach my “Advanced T-SQL Querying and Reporting: Building Effectiveness” course. This is a course that I’ve been teaching ...

It’s a phrase I use often, especially when teaching, and I wish I had realised the concept years earlier. (And of course, fits with this month’s T-SQL Tuesday topic, hosted by Argenis Fernandez) When I’m sick enough to go to the doctor, I see a GP. I used to typically see the same guy, but he’s moved on now. However, when he has been able to ...

My guys are great! When PASS started accepting abstract submissions for their Summit (in October this year), some of the LobsterPot employees immediately started looking into ideas for talks they could do. We rate communication as one of our key values at LobsterPot, and all my staff are keen presenters. Roger Noble was at the PASS Summit ...

Success Quietly Looms. Not quite 11 words, I know. I’ll put more at the end. Definitely SQL related though, right? (And it’s even an acrostic!) Tom LaRock started this, and Stacia Misner tagged me. Monday is over now though (heck, it’s well into Tuesday here), so I’m not going to tag anyone else. I’m not talking about our success (even though ...

Roger’s been doing a great job extending PivotViewer recently, and you can find the list of LobsterPot pivots at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au Many months back, the TED Talk that Gary Flake did about Pivot caught my imagination, and I did some research into it. At the time, most of what we did with Pivot was geared towards what we could do for ...

Considering that I run a database consultancy, I should be fairly biased on this question, and suggest that you can't possibly cope without database professionals – except that I don’t really believe it all that much. I do believe it, and I’ll demonstrate why in this post – but the question of whether or not you actually get proper database people ...

At LobsterPot, there are a few things that we definitely value above other things. Integrity is top of the list – it has to be. In fact, it is the quality I refuse to compromise on with my staff. When I identify someone I want to approach for a job, I have always weighed this particular aspect of the person as best I can, and regularly make it ...