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 ...

What's Going on at SQLServerPedia.com?Since the news broke that I was leaving Quest, I've gotten a lot of questions about the future of SQLServerPedia.com (SSP).  For those of you who don't know, SSP is a very popular community wiki and blog aggregator with nearly one hundred bloggers actively syndicating their content on the ...

Introduction My friend and brother K. Brian Kelley (Blog | @kbriankelley | SQLPeople) recently wrote a meta-blog (blog about blogging) post entitled Don’t Wait to Start Blogging. Just before that, I received an email response to an earlier post (I Am Here To Help™) requesting advice on how to get started blogging. I directed the person asking me ...

I would like for this “Read Article” link at the SSWUG.org website to take readers interested in my writing to my writing and not to a screen to sign up for a service. This isn’t the first time I’ve asked about this – I’ve requested my work not be linked on this website in the past. I believe publishing my work without my permission is not ...

Okay, I'm following the lead of Joe Webb (blog | twitter), who recently posted ''My Most Popular Posts From 2010.''  I think it can be a very useful exercise to go back and look at what blog posts were popular and, arguably more importantly, which posts were most thought-provoking and generated the most dialog (whether it is praise, ...

For some time now I have been intending to put some material together relating my blogging experiences since I began blogging in 2004 and that led to me submitting a session for SQLBits recently where I intended to do just that. That didn’t get enough votes to allow me to present however so instead I resolved to write a blog post about it and ...

Introduction The other morning I awoke and said to myself, ''Self, you need a million bucks.'' After breakfast, I waltzed down to the local bank. I slipped into the vault and managed to grab a million bucks while no one was paying attention. Quietly, I slipped out of the vault and made it home with the money. My logic? The money was there ...

I started blogging about SQL Server here at SQLblog back in July, 2009 and it was a lot of fun, I enjoyed it a lot. Then later, after a series of blog posts about the Query Optimizer, I was invited to write an entire book about that same topic. But after a few months I realized that it was going to be hard to continue both blogging and writing ...

When I entered the title of this post, a big yellow exclamation mark (inside a dull gray triangle) appeared above my head: ''Warning: potential circular reference!''  But I think it's useful once in a while to step back and think about what you typically blog about, and how it can impact the community.  Simon Sabin made a brief post ...

Ok, I finally got fed up with all of the spam in my historical dasBlog postings. It's really embarrassing to send a link to a a colleague, only to have them snicker at all of the spam comments and trackbacks. For those of you who don't know what a trackback is, it's basically an acknowledgement that enables authors to keep ...