The University of Virginia is having a fall conference that is free and open to the public on Tuesday November 13th. My good friend Andy Leonard and I will be speaking on various SQL Server related topics so if you are in the area and available that day you are most welcome to stop by. You can find more information and register for the ...

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 ...

I’m traveling to the United Kingdom (York, England, to be specific) in September, joining Brent Ozar, Brad McGehee, Kevin Kline, Simon Sabin – and a host of other top-notch speakers. They will be covering deep technical topics ranging from server health checks to SANs and Virtualization. So what will I be talking about? SQL Server ...

As most of you know, I tend to spend a little time on social networks like Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn. On one of those networks, Ken Simmons sent the following thought: “One hour sessions give you great ideas you can explore; full day sessions give you in depth knowledge you can use.” He was talking about the difference in a ...

I worked with a team of folks brought together by Quest software, and we presented multiple sessions on SQL Server Performance Tuning. Here are the links I mentioned during those presentations:   Blitz! SQL Server Takeovers (Brent)   You're minding your own business in your corner office - well, no, you're a DBA, so it's just your ...

Quest Software is a great partner with Microsoft, and I’m honored to be able to present with Brent Ozar, Kevin Kline and Ari Weil at a day-long event that you can attend for free. We’re going to cover many aspects of performance tuning, from waits and queues to the Windows System Monitor, which you might also know as PerfMon or ...

I had the privilege of presenting to the Adelaide SQL Server User Group in Australia last evening, and I covered the Data Access Component (DAC) and the Utility Control Point (UCP) from SQL Server 2008 R2. Here are some links from that presentation:   Whitepaper: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff381683.aspx Tutorials: ...

I’m sitting in the Seattle airport, waiting for my flight to Silicon Valley California for the SQL Server 2008 R2 Launch Event. By some quirk of nature, they are asking me to Emcee the event – but that’s another post entirely.   I’m reflecting on the SQL Saturday 27 event that was just held in Portland, Oregon this last Saturday. These ...

I do a presentation (and a class) called ''SQL Server for the Oracle DBA''. It's a non-marketing overview that gives you the basics of working with SQL Server if you're already familiar wtih how Oracle works. This class and these links DO NOT help you with ''Why should I use Oracle/SQL Server instead of Oracle/SQL Server'' - I'll assume you're ...