I 've been a writer of trade level technical materials for over 13 years now, writing books, articles, blogs, and even tweets for a variety of outlets, almost exclusively about Microsoft SQL Server. While I won't claim to be the best writer in the world, I feel like I have the process of writing down fairly well, yet, for the life of me, there is ...

For the past two years, I have had the honor and privilege or authoring SSIS Design Patterns alongside Jessica Moss, Michelle Ufford, Tim Mitchell, and Matt Masson. Publication of the book – like many projects of this scope – has been delayed. The current publication date is 27 Aug 2012 and I have high confidence in this date. I take ...

As the book progresses, I find myself veering from the original stated outline quite a bit, because as I teach about this more (and I am teaching a daylong db design class in August at http://www.sqlsolstice.com/… shameless plug, but it is on topic :) I start to find that a given order works better. Originally I had slated myself to talk more ...

A while back, I was working on a short article about Normalization for a book that never got published (admittedly I wasn’t getting paid for the article, and it wasn’t for charity, so I wasn’t that broken up over it.)  The task at hand was to, in 2 pages or less, describe the process of normalization and help you to know when you have ...

Introduction Brent Ozar (Blog - @BrentO) published a series of posts on experinces authoring his first book. If you're interested in writing, Brent is fresh from the battlefield and eloquently conveys a sense of the trials and triumphs of the experience. Additional Links Kevin Kline (Blog - @kekline):The Book Writing Business, Part 1The ...

Introduction I got some cool responses to my post Blog (Durnit!). This includes at least one blog, Adventures In SQL, by David Levy (Blog / Twitter), started as a result! Wow, how cool! Reading comments and email, I realize I left out one important part, where to... Get Started First, you need to decide whether you're going to host your own ...

Introduction The past few days I've read several blurbs from folks expressing why they don't blog. The reasons range from ''I have nothing interesting to say'' to ''I don't know enough'' to ''Everything I want to write about has been blogged already.'' Pfffft (to quote @RachelAppel) Come on. Seriously? If you think, you can blog. I Have ...