Yes, the SQL book I was involved in two years ago has a sequel. In the first book, I wrote chapters 7 and 40, and was one of 53 MVPs that contributed. And the proceeds went to War Child. Yes, none of the MVPs who wrote, edited, etc, got any royalties – that all went to charity. This time, I wrote just one chapter (chapter 2), but there have been ...

Yeah, alright. I know PASS puts on heaps of free training all the time. There are meetings around the world all the time, as held by hundreds of chapters. Seriously, there’s over 240 chapters in the world. If you figure that they typically have a 2 hour meeting once a month, that makes over 480 hours of training per month. That’s an average over ...

I’m not going to ask you to vote for the abstracts that I submitted for the PASS Summit. I’m not even going to mention the abstracts that Roger and Ashley submitted. I figure if you’re reading this, you may have already read the post I wrote about them, back before SQLPASS had said that there’d be voting. Instead, I’m going to pick a few people ...

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 ...

At the PASS Summit last month, I did a set (Lightning Talk) about collation, and in particular, the difference between the “English” spoken by people from the US, Australia and the UK. One of the examples I gave was that in the US drivers might stop for gas, whereas in Australia, they just open the window a little. This is what’s known as a ...

I just got out of my SQLPASS session, and have uploaded the script from that to the LobsterPot site. The following link should get you there: http://www.lobsterpot.com.au/sqlpass_IncredibleShrinkingExecutionPlan.txt I’ve uploaded it as plain text, to make life easier for my host. Enjoy!

So I’m in the middle of a presentation at SQLPASS, and thought I’d just write a blogpost. (Here’s the key – it’s the Zoom function) My session is on the Incredible Shrinking Execution Plan, and the basic idea behind it is to demonstrate stuff that the Query Optimizer can do to avoid work. It’s much like some of the people I’ve worked with over ...

Sitting on the bloggers table is turning out to be fun. I’ve scared off Buck Woody (@buckwoody) (he said he had things to do), and Thomas LaRock (@sqlrockstar) has sat down in the spot he had assigned before the start. Despite the fact that there’s mostly keyboard noises going on, rather than people saying things to each other, the community ...

Atlanta is getting announced. It’s a system which runs on your SQL Server system, uploading information about your system, its configuration, performance, and so on, to a service in the cloud. This information can then be browsed (or queried, of course), using a dashboard of information. Access to it can also be given to Microsoft Support, so that ...

Dave Mariani from Yahoo (VP Development, User Data and Analytics) is on stage at the PASS Keynote, talking about how they analyse 120TB of data each day, delivering insight and the information they need to provide for advertisers. The specs are 3.5B events per day. 1.2TB of data to be loaded (50GB files every hour), with a 12TB cube. Funnily ...