Archives for October 2012

Conquer Your Fear of Virtualization with a Free Day of Training at PASS!

  Click the link above to register! Presented by my buddy, David Klee at House of Brick, one of the nations top VMWare consultancies specializing in Oracle and SQL Server deployments. David has a great write-up of this boot camp at http://www.davidklee.net/2012/10/01/virtualizing-your-business-critical-sql-servers-free-boot-camp-by-house-of-brick/. … [Read more...]

Katie is growing up too fast

And she's looking quite old too!Her most recent birthday, July 26th, was her 11th.  She's as tall as her sisters and mom, even though she's in 6th grade.  Don't let the unibrow and handle bar mustache fool you - she's a beautiful young lady!She's also bonkers. … [Read more...]

SQLCruising & Josie

I sometimes teach a class on SQL Server on a cruise ship. This spring, the cruise went to Alaska.I was lucky enough to have some extra room on the Alaska cruise. I gave my mom the open bunk.There were great people with whom we shared the cruise, like my friend Mala.And some beautiful views, such as the Mendenhall Glacier (behind me).My favorite place on this cruise was the beautiful city of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.I'll be doing another cruise next spring with the awesome team at SQLCruise.com.  I get to bring Rachel this time - to the Caribbean islands! … [Read more...]

The Zombie PerfMon Counter That Never Dies! Quick Tip

The PerfMon Counters That Just Won't Die One of the things that's simultaneously great and horrible about the Internet is that once something gets posted out in the ether, it basically never goes away.  (Some day, politicians will realize this.  We can easily fact check their consistency).  Because of longevity of content posted to the Internet, a lot of performance tuning topics become "zombies".  We shoot 'em in dead, but they keep coming back! In other words, those old recommendations were a suggested best practices for long ago, for a specific version of SQL Server, but are now … [Read more...]

Katie was so Tiny in 2008

This is when Katie was in the process of losing a tooth.  It's kind'a funny. … [Read more...]

Sam Graduates

I brought the little girls up to scenic Depauw University near Indianapolis to see Sam graduate.  The girls were so wonderful.  I really enjoyed spending that time with them.The campus was delightful.  Sam's girlfriend, Stephanie, was also a real gem.He's hard to see, but Sam is directly in front of the "Depauw University" banner on the left.Sam graduated with a 4.0 average and went on to win a Fullbright Fellowship to study archaeology and Spanish in Mexico at the site of some ancient Mayan ruins.  Kudos to you, Sam! … [Read more...]

Recap – SQL Saturday 151 in Orlando

It's always a feel-good experience for me to return to SQL Saturday in Orlando, the place where SQL Saturdays  were started by Andy Warren (Twitter | Blog).  On this trip, I delivered a full-day, pre-conference seminar on Troubleshooting and Performance Tuning SQL Server.  I also delivered a session on SQL Server Internals and Architecture to a totally packed house.  For those of you who emailed me directly, here's the link for the special SQL Sentry offer. I got to attend the extended events session by Jack Corbett (Twitter | Blog), middle in the photo above.  Good stuff, Jack!  Jack … [Read more...]

Summer in FL

A double-rainbow. Beautiful, spanning the sky from end to end.We brought much beauty with us.  And we took it home with us too.Brave girl. Pilots the boat. Terrifies the passengers.Do we look less stressed than usual? We were. Very much so. … [Read more...]