On 17th December 2009 Aaron Nelson (you may know him as @sqlvariant) had a great idea – he invented the #SQLHelp hashtag; with a little kickstart from Brent Ozar the idea grew and #SQLHelp became a successful QnA channel in the SQL Server community and is today going from strength to strength. I’m a great advocate of SQLHelp and not just because ...

The SQL Server community is really engaged. They are an active bunch on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, they help each other on forums, they attend conferences. But that isn’t enough interaction – the community started a grass-roots effort to hold local conferences on a Saturday. Free conferences. Odds are there’s one near ...

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 ...

Today I have been using Windows Installer XML (WiX) to build an installer (.msi file) that would install a SQL Server database on a server of my choosing; the source code for that database lives in datadude (a tool which you may know by one of quite a few other names). The basis for this work was a most excellent blog post by Duke Kamstra entitled ...

Today I worked the booth at TechEd 2010, manning the new “Surface” computer, which is just the coolest object on the planet. After that I didn’t attend a single SQL Server session – instead I’ve been frequenting SharePoint, Microsoft Office, and even the High-Performance Computing sessions. The reason is that I get ...

''The world's favorite season is the spring. All things seem possible in May.''-   Edwin Way Teale  This spring, the Portland, Oregon, development community is coming together in a way never experienced before. Using the University of Portland campus, SQL Saturday and Portland CodeCamp are combining and coordinating ...

Database Design. Sounds simple, and at the same time, demanding. I mean, what's to design. You just need a few tables to hold the data for the application you are creating. You just can't really take the time to design -the entire project is agile and under continuous evolution. Or, you are trying to support a database that someone else ...

Yesterday, Jonathan Kehayias wrote in his blog post ''Have you got air in your spare..'' about dealing with a flat time. He went on to compare spare tires to HA/DR planning. An excellent article and recommended reading. I wish to expand on Jonathan's discourse a bit. It strikes me that he opened the door for a fertile analogy. Consider that ...

SQL Server allows nesting of Transactions –in a sense. In truth, there is only one Transaction, with each ‘nested transaction’ serving to increase (and decrease) the @@TRANCOUNT indicator. The transaction can be committed or rolled back at any point that the @@TRANCOUNT value is equal to one. Error conditions may or may not cause the transaction ...

In Brian Kelly's recent blog post, he makes an excellent case outlining why there are few options but to 'Trust' SQL Server Administrators. And then he goes into excellent detail explaining that it may be impossible to completely 'prohibit' disruptive behavior, and that one should establish a robust auditing of security events. And it is not ...