The topic for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday is about the journey. Wendy Pastrick’s choice (I’m hosting again next month!). There are a lot of journeys. There are some that just keep going, and others that seem to finish (some in success; some in failure). Of course, many of the ones that finish end up being the start of new journeys, but sometimes ...

For this T-SQL Tuesday Bob Pusateri asked us to share how we came to love presenting. Before I ever got involved in computing technology I had (and still have) a love for the theatre, specifically musical theatre. When I was little the majority of albums (this was the 1950s, kids) we had were cast albums from Broadway shows my parents had seen ...

Louis Davidson just asked me why I write, and now Bob Pusateri (@sqlbob) is asking me why I present, which is his question for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday. If you didn’t follow the link to see his actual question, you’ll need to know that he actually posed the question “How did you come to love presenting?” Well, sometimes I don’t, but on the ...

Early in my career as a DBA, I have to admit I didn’t quite “get” what all the fuss was about with the multiple file and multiple filegroup capability in SQL Server. Over the years, though, as I learned more about partitioning, backup strategies for large databases and, most importantly, storage internals I’ve started to catch on. For today’s ...

Let’s start with some basics and then jump in a bit deeper, for this post to go with the 40th T-SQL Tuesday, hosted this month by Jen McCown. SQL Server holds data, and that data is stored physically in files. Of course, in the database world we think of the data as living in tables*, so naturally there must be some sort of mapping between the ...

This T-SQL Tuesday is about using PowerShell to do something with SQL Server. Now, if you've read any of my blog posts you probably know I've been using PowerShell to do things with SQL Server for a while now, but I'm glad Wayne decided on this topic for his T-SQL Tuesday topic, because everyone has different ways to use PowerShell, and you can ...

Every year, PowerShell increases its stranglehold on the Windows Server system and the applications that run upon it – with good reason too. Its consistent mechanisms for interaction between its scripting interface and the underlying systems make it easy for people to feel comfortable, and there is a discoverability that has been lacking in many ...

I’m not big on New Year resolutions. I can’t say I respond particularly well to “everyone’s doing something, I should too” situations. Peer pressure can be useful at times, but I also find that it can make me even more stubborn. So when Jason Brimhall chose the topic for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday as “standing firm”, considering the ideas of ...

Tables are only metadata. They don’t store data. I’ve written something about this before, but I want to take a viewpoint of this idea around the topic of joins, especially since it’s the topic for T-SQL Tuesday this month. Hosted this time by Sebastian Meine (@sqlity), who has a whole series on joins this month. Good for him – it’s a great ...

Last week I attended the PASS Summit in Seattle. I blogged from both keynotes (Keynote #1 and Keynote #2), as well as the WIT Luncheon - which SQL Sentry sponsored. I had a fantastic time at the conference, even though these days I attend far fewer sessions that I used to. As a company, we were overwhelmed by the positive energy in the Expo ...