On Monday this week I was downtown for some business as the new MVP awards started hitting Twitter. As several of my good friends were awarded this round, I was very happy and excited for them. They’ve all worked long and hard for our wonderful community, and it felt absolutely amazing to see them get […]
I was invited by the PASS Professional Development Virtual Chapter to deliver “Talk tech to me – improving your technical presentation skills” on the 13th of September. The recording just went live and can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srBe5Q-2xPE&feature=youtu.be but I have to warn sensitive viewers that there are some very disturbingly graphical dancing in there. I […]
Until the Power BI team gives us the ability to specify a custom date format on a column, one has to jump through a few hoops to get a custom date format to be recognized as a an actual date format. I finally decided to blog about it as it seems a common enough issue […]
I’ve been asked about the technical setup I’ve just recently put together to be able to do remote sessions, podcasts, videocasts and similar. Now, this is kind of a dangerous thing to ask me about, as I’m VERY much a techno freak, so you asked, you shall receive. In excruciating detail… This is a picture […]
I’m sitting at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam contemplating my midsummer weekend. I was accepted to speak at SQL Grillen, a free one-day (plus one day of paid pre-cons) event in the metropolis of Lingen, Germany. Never heard of Lingen? Well, neither had I, before this event. When William Durkin, the main organizer of the event, […]
A week ago I woke up in Tel Aviv, Israel, the day after I gave my presentation “Speak your hands – using body language for effective communication” at SQL Saturday in Israel. Despite feeling the onset of a sore throat, I contemplated how I had gotten here. I did not expect to find myself in […]
I just came back from my latest trip last night and I’ve been thinking about how to summarize the latest events I’ve been to. It all began with the NIC conference in Oslo in February. There I presented two sessions (Azure SQL Server – the cloud awakens and boring is stable, stable is good – […]
This T-SQL Tuesday is an interesting one, as the challenge is to talk about something you’re passionate about outside of the usual work grind. Well, it turns out I’m very passionate about Star Wars, and I’m very passionate charity. Funny thing is, there is a way to combine them. But first, let’s rewind a few […]
I stumbled across SpeakingMentors after seeing a Tweet from Alex Yates. It’s a completely free opportunity for new and budding speakers to get one-on-one mentoring with more experienced people in the industry, all with the goal that sharing is indeed caring. I can’t count the number of times I’ve met absolutely brilliant people that had […]
Part 5: updating the basic settings for SQL Server 2016/2017 It’s been quite a while since I penned my best practices posts for SQL Server 2012/2014 and I’ve been saying for ages that I should update them for SQL Server 2016. Well, it would seem that hell finally froze over as here we are! Let’s […]