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 […]
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Mala Mahadevan, and she poses a very interesting question with learning goals for 2018. The T-SQL Tuesday founder Adam Machanic posted on Twitter that a learning plan is the way to go, to which I responded that such a list (I misread “plan” to “list”) will probably be […]
This T-SQL Tuesday was an interesting one, and I’ve been spending quite a few hours thinking about how to formulate my thoughts. Unfortunately the end of said Tuesday is nearing with unreasonable speed, so I’ll have to be brief. This month’s challenge comes from Ewald Cress and is to recognize those who have made a meaningful contribution […]
I’ve been helping troubleshoot a SQL Server 2014 that kind of tips over every hour when a job is run on one of the application servers. All eight cores of the server go through the roof together with the counter for batch requests/sec – and then everything grinds to a halt. This behavior continues for […]
One of the things often overlooked with Azure SQL databases is the fact that they need love in exactly the same way as their on-premises brethren. Sure, Azure will keep an eye out for the most blatant issues, but the old adage “a penny of prevention is worth a pound of cure” still holds water. […]
As you know by now, I do a fair bit of presenting and teaching. One of my primary tools is Powerpoint, and that necessitates a presentation clicker. I’ve been using a Logitech R400 for quite some time, and it does its job admirably. A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine showed me the new […]
Today I hit upon this bug that’s apparently been around for ages. In short, sometimes SQL Server Configuration Manager works as expected when it comes to enabling and disabling specific IP addresses for the instance to listen on, and sometimes you are greeted with a very irritating message telling you that “the specified file is […]
A student of mine had a question about combining data from multiple Excel sheets and doing calculations on the data. I realized I didn’t have a clear-cut answer so I decided to do some digging. The scenario looked like this: I created three excel files, each with a column for name and one for value. […]