What would a software developer reality show look like? Now there’s a thought. Would it even be interesting? I recently heard of an organization donating a day of 30 developers on the company payroll, and the developers themselves committing another day resulting in 60 man hours of high powered raw software development power. How about that for a reality show? […]

Microsoft Windows Server 2012 EBook I came across this link through a posting on Linked-In for an eBook on Microsoft Windows Server 2012. I found the book to be very helpful in describing the Microsoft vision of private and public clouds, and collaboration between the two. Although the book has only five chapters, and is based on beta version of […]

A Case for Normalization Recently I came across a process that was causing indexes on a customer’s table to become extremely fragmented throughout the day. The table was used for the purposes of knowing if a document had been updated each day. There was no need to know when, just had it been updated. In this case, the customer chose […]

Featured Article(s) How to Manage… Without Micromanaging As leaders and managers, we struggle with how to manage without micromanaging. One effective method is to manage the situation versus the people. When we focus on the overall goal or solution instead of the insignificant details and tasks, everything runs smoother. A Use for Select * Today I’m sharing a tip from […]

Coming Events SSWUG.org provides premier opportunities for you to learn techniques helping you improve your craft. One great way to keep aware of these opportunities is to go to www.sswug.org and scroll down to Upcoming Events. If you don’t see one your interested in, click on More Events to see even more opportunities. SELECT * Feedback Today we have some […]

Last Days to Register… Hands-On Busines Intelligence workshop with Brian Knight Taught by the master, this seriously hands-on workshop will take you from start to finish with practical creation of a data warehouse solution. You’ll learn the real-world things you need to know, and you’ll be learning them from the master of BI, Brian Knight. The workshop will be held […]

Maintaining Statistics Yesterday we were talking about the importance of statistics for the performance of your SQL Server database. In order to maintain the usefulness of your statistics, they have to be updated to represent the distribution in the index or table to which they refer. You can have them automatically created and updated as data is entered. Doing this […]

DNS Virus A DNS virus has been released for a number of months. The USA Federal Bureau of Investigation has been protecting the Internet from this virus by hosting a number of servers that are being take offline today for the first time after the virus was discovered. This virus can impact many kinds of devices that may be connected […]

Accidental DBA – Query Optimization Tip One of the simplest ways to improve query performance is to write your SQL in such as way as to reduce or eliminate table or index scans. A scan occurs when the SQL engine must look at every single row in the object being scanned and evaluate the result. On smaller tables the performance […]

What Would You Do? Amazon experienced outage recently due to power failure and a software glitch in their host management software, potentially due to a Leap Second bug in Java. I may not have all the causes correct. However, that really isn’t my point. Businesses are moving to the Cloud because it makes good sense. It can reduce cost and […]