Introduction A long time ago in a place not so far away from Farmville, I learned Motorola 6800 machine code. It wasn't easy but with patient instruction from my neighbor, I was soon making things happen on the computer screen and in memory. I was hooked! Fast Forward 3.3 Decades... I'm still hooked! That thrill was and remains my ...

More Better  Last week I read and blogged about Better by Dr. Atul Gawande. In Part III of the book, Dr. Gawande focuses on Ingenuity with three chapters entitled The Score, The Bell Curve, and For Performance. There are lots of good takeaways for software development in these chapters. Full Disclosure  One stood out ...

It's The Little Things...  In Better, Dr. Atul Gawande mentions several basic things medical professionals can do to drastically impact the rate of hospital-passed infection. His first point is: Wash your hands. This seems simple on the surface, but the time requirements for properly washing one's hands using traditional soaps is ...

Jamie Thomson has posted a great series on the SSIS 2008 Data Profiling Task. The Data Profiling Task allows developers to quickly assess key statistics about data in a database table. When I say ''statistics'' I mean things like column value and length distribution, column null ratio, column patterns, and functional dependencies. You ...

I like SourceGear. I like what I know about the company, the people, and their products - mostly the people. SourceGear DiffMerge is helping me this morning. I created an FTP class  in an SSIS Script Task from code I found online because... well, that's another post. At this point in my refactoring, I have implemented ...

You can find SSIS 2005 Custom Tasks and Component Samples at CodePlex. At the same location you can find SSIS 2008 samples. How cool is that? The samples include source code in VB.Net and C#. They serve as a decent starting place for developing your own SSIS custom tasks and components. Free registration to CodePlex is required to access the ...

Introduction: The World Series (1979) and Photography Willie ''Pops'' Stargell started my interest in photography (...a funny way to start a post on a SQL Server blog site, but bear with me). Pops Stargell led the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates to win the World Series. He was the MVP that year as well. My Mom, in the only time I ever remember her ...

Although it doesn't mention my name on the PASS website, I'm presenting the PASS webcast tomorrow on Team Edition for Database Professionals. If you're interested you can sign up to attend at the PASS website. Hope to see you there! :{> Andy

Eric Wise drew some heat from the developer community at CodeBetter.com with this post about the need for a DBA during development (see my post on the subject here). I think Eric makes a couple good points, one explicit, one implied: 1. (Explicit) A DBA - or Database Developer, more accurately (and there is a difference) - adds ...