This might be most most overcommitted four-week period of time ever in my life. I'm tired just thinking about it! Not only am I traveling internationally and speaking over the next few weeks, I'm also helping on two book projects, learning some new applications from Quest Software, and helping on a small Transact-SQL refactoring project. Swag on hand? I've got a special printing of 500 video training DVDs for this trip: SQL Server Training on DMVs Performance Monitor and Wait Events Plus, I'll have a few posters, stickers, and other goodies. Come see me! SQL Saturday … [Read more...]
Archives for March 2012
Starting this week: Dublin, Maidenhead, and London
Filed Under: Conferences, Databases, Presentations, Professional Development, SQL Server, SQLMag, SQLServerPedia Syndication Tagged With: Best Practices, Career, DBA, Developer, Leadership, Professional Development, Quest Software, SQL Server 2012, Training
The Expert’s Conference (TEC) – For AD, SharePoint, Exchange, PowerShell and Other Admins
What is TEC? The Expert's Conference (TEC) is a multi-day event featuring five co-located Microsoft educational conferences at the San Diego Marriott Marquis & Marina April 29-May 2. It's pretty - see! The event includes advanced 400-level training on Microsoft Directory & Identity (including Active Directory), Exchange Server, SharePoint, Virtualization (Microsoft Hyper-V) & Workspace Management, and PowerShell Deep Dives. There are lots of great activities for Quest and Microsoft customers and partners. In addition, there's a Quest Software Day, with User Groups … [Read more...]
Filed Under: Administration, Cloud, Conferences, Professional Development, SQL Server, SQLMag, SQLServerPedia Syndication, TCD blog post, Virtualization Tagged With: Active Directory, PowerShell, Virtualization
Dev Advice: Make a Tiny Dev Database Act Like a HUGE Prod Database
Here's an evergreen question. It's a question that never completely goes away. But lately, I've been getting it a few times per week. So I thought it's time to readdress the question, which usually takes some form of the following: I can't really do effective development on my little dev laptop because our production SQL Server database is 15 gazillionbytes, way too big for my workstation. What's a uber-nerd to do? Well, maybe they didn't use the word "uber-nerd". But you get my drift, right? The production database is really, really big - unmanageably big for keeping a local copy. … [Read more...]
Filed Under: Challenges, Cool Technologies, Databases, On-Line Resources, Performance, SQL Server, SQLMag, SQLServerPedia Syndication, Tips & Tricks, Tool Time, Transact-SQL Programming Tagged With: Best Practices, DBA, Developer, Performance, Transact-SQL Programming
Have You Heard About the Microsoft TechNet Wiki?
Here's another one to add to your list of browser bookmarks! The TechNet Wiki covers Microsoft technologies from writers throughout the community for use by the community. As with all wikis, this grassroots effort needs your help. Microsoft is encouraging everyone to contribute the effort - all you have to do is join. So start a whole new article, add your knowledge or draw from your experience to improve an existing article. You can start small or large... Join in at http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/ or simply use the wiki as a new resource to answer your tough technology … [Read more...]
Filed Under: Cool Technologies, On-Line Resources, SQLMag, SQLServerPedia Syndication, TCD blog post Tagged With: TechNet, Wiki
Why Do IT Pros Make Awful Managers?
I'm being a little bit incendiary with that title. Many IT pros grow into very good managers. But it almost never comes naturally. It takes hard work and many hard won lessons before most of us ever achieve a degree of skill and comfort with managing other people. Thinking about moving into management? Help is here! I've been spending the past several years turning the lessons I've learned as a manager into a set of courses for IT professionals who want to make the leap in to management. I'll be presenting some of these lessons as full-day seminars. I hope you can join me! Details … [Read more...]
Filed Under: Challenges, Opinion, Professional Development, SQLMag, SQLServerPedia Syndication Tagged With: Career, Leadership, Management
Accelerate OLTP with HP and Microsoft’s New High Performance Reference Architecture
If you haven't started to read Shashank Pawar (blog), you're missing out. Shashank is part of Microsoft Australia and has been writing some very good content lately. Here's an example from the Reference Architecture for High Performance SQL Server: HP and Microsoft engineering teams have worked together to create a reference architecture to Accelerate Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) database workloads with a fully-flash based HP/Microsoft architecture and achieve significant performance increases, simplified database manageability, and industry leading TCO. The details come in a … [Read more...]
Filed Under: Architecture, Challenges, Cool Technologies, Databases, Hardware, IO, Performance, SQL Server, SQLMag, SQLServerPedia Syndication Tagged With: DBA, Oracle, Performance
IT Horror Stories – Managers Run Amuck!
It seems like managers, so often, either go way overboard or go into hybernation and do way to little. This month, I had the pleasure and horror to hear two stories of managers run amuck with power. The first is from a friend and IT professional I'll call Tony. Tony said this: I worked for a firm as an IT manager when it was going through a relocation project. We migrated from a shoddy IT infrastructure in a shoddy, unsecured server area (which had water pipes running around the back of the servers to the coffee machine with rodents visibly running around) to a shiny new office with a … [Read more...]
Filed Under: Ethics, IT Horror Stories, Opinion, Professional Development, SQLMag, SQLServerPedia Syndication Tagged With: Humor, IT Horror Stories
Emily conks her noggin
Poor Em has had a rough go of it.lately. She's gotten a little beat up with accidents of vaious kinds. Here she is a the ER. Turns out she had a mild concussion. … [Read more...]
Filed Under: Emily Kline
