On 17th December 2009 Aaron Nelson (you may know him as @sqlvariant) had a great idea – he invented the #SQLHelp hashtag; with a little kickstart from Brent Ozar the idea grew and #SQLHelp became a successful QnA channel in the SQL Server community and is today going from strength to strength. I’m a great advocate of SQLHelp and not just because ...

In April 2010 Twitter announced a new feature that they would soon be introducing - Twitter Annotations. Put simply Twitter Annotations can be described as the ability to attach metadata to a tweet; think hashtags on steroids. Lots of people were quite excited about it:I love to sit on the beach.  One of the coolest things about the beach ...

Yesterday the public availability of Data Explorer, a new data mashup tool from the SQL Server team, was announced at Announcing the Labs release of Microsoft Codename “Data Explorer”. Upon seeing the first public demos of Data Explorer at SQL Pass 2011 I published a blog post Thoughts on Data Explorer which must have caught someone’s attention ...

Quick post - I got news that I will be speaking at the PASS Summit 2011. What a huge honor. As I understand it, I am the first Venezuelan ever to speak at PASS. I'm super excited! The Lightning Talk is called ''Quick Tips to Enhance tempdb Performance'', and I have to practice this talk a lot. I'll have exactly 5 minutes to deliver it, and ...

My PASS demos are now available on my website for my Precon Session on SQL Server Concurrency: Locking and Blocking and Row Versions, Oh My!  and for my Spotlight Session on Seeking SQL Server Secrets. You can download both sets of scripts from www.SQLServerInternals.com/conferences Also, I set up a FaceBook fan page a few weeks ago, for ...

I overheard/read a couple of things today that really made me, data junkie that I am, take a step back and think, “Hmmm, yeah, that could be really interesting” and I wanted to make a note of them here so that (a) I could bring them to the attention of anyone that happens to read this and (b) I can maybe come back here in a few years and see if ...

I have an interest, a slightly perverse one some might say, in using online services and trying to figure out what the underlying (logical) data model is and in this day and age Twitter is one that lends itself very well to scrutiny. Consider this recent tweet of mine: The URL that enables you to see that tweet is ...

On 31st January 2010 Windows Azure and SQL Azure will transition to becoming services that you have to pay for which means that my three small demos that are hosted up there are going to disappear hence I thought now would be a good time to review before they are digitally ground into dust. Tweetpoll Tweetpoll was a demo that I wrote back in ...

During my presentation A whistlestop tour of SSIS addins yesterday at SQLBits I demonstrated how Jessica Moss & Andy Leonard’s Twitter Task could be used in conjunction with SSIS’s Term Extraction component to discover what people might be saying in their replies to a Twitter user. The Term Extraction component is a little-known and ...

I'm not entirely certain what color that is, but follow me here (if you dare). In keeping with the Twitter mentality I'll keep this post ultra-short.