I'll be in Kansas City next week doing some SSIS training. I don't think I've ever been to KC so I'm looking forward to the trip! When I found out I would be in town, I dutifully contacted the Kansas City SQL Server Users Group to see if they were having a meeting. When traveling I like to check out Users Groups to see what other folks are doing ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...