I was wrong – I passed the MCM lab last month. I know I thought I’d failed – I’m still surprised that I passed. Maybe I managed to satisfy enough of enough questions. Certainly none of the questions were beyond me, as I wrote just after I’d sat it. But I do know that I left more questions in an incomplete state than I would’ve liked. The things ...

Readers of my blog, or followers on Twitter will know I took the MCM Lab exam a couple of days ago. I let people know I was doing the exam, rather than doing the ‘normal’ thing of doing it in secret and hoping no-one found out until a successful result had been published. Oh, and this post has been approved by the MCM program’s boB Taylor ...

In two days I’ll’ve finished the MCM Lab exam, 88-971. If you do an internet search for 88-971, it’ll tell you the answer is –883. Obviously. It’ll also give you a link to the actual exam page, which is useful too, once you’ve finished being distracted by the calculator instead of going to the thing you’re actually looking for. (Do people ...

I took the SQL 2008 MCM Knowledge exam while in Seattle for the PASS Summit ten days ago. I wasn’t planning to do it, but I got persuaded to try. I was meaning to write this post to explain myself before the result came out, but it seems I didn’t get typing quickly enough. Those of you who know me will know I’m a big fan of certification, to a ...

I don’t tend to find that anything about me gets described as “Fabulous”. It’s not a word I ever use myself, so I was slightly amused to see it here. It’s going to be an interesting week (in May, Monday 14th to Saturday 19th), in which I have two stints in classrooms (the three day course in downtown Chicago and this pre-con), plus two ...

This coming Tuesday sees a midweek SQL Saturday hit Adelaide. LobsterPot’s a sponsor, as are a bunch of other companies. An all day event, with two tracks featuring some of the best material you’ve ever seen presented. I’m presenting too. The thing I really want to draw your attention to is that we have two sessions from Paul White. If you ...

In May, I’ll be in the US. I have board meetings for PASS at the SQLRally event in Dallas, and then I’m going to be spending a bit of time in Chicago. The big news is that while I’m in Chicago (May 14-16), I’m going to teach my “Advanced T-SQL Querying and Reporting: Building Effectiveness” course. This is a course that I’ve been teaching ...

A few days after the end of 24HOP, I find myself reflecting on it. I’m still waiting on most of the information. I want to be able to discover things like where the countries represented on each of the sessions, and things like that. So far, I have the feedback scores and the numbers of attendees. The data was provided in a PDF, so while I wait ...

There’s a bunch of stuff going on at the moment in the SQL world, so if you’ve missed this particular piece of news, let me tell you a bit about it. Twice a year, the SQL community puts on its biggest virtual event – 24 Hours of PASS. And the next one is tomorrow – March 21st, 2012. Twenty-four sessions, back-to-back, featuring a selection of ...

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 ...