As a long-standing member of PASS who lives in the greater Seattle area and has attended about nine of these Summits, let me start out by saying how GREAT it was to go to Charlotte, North Carolina this year.
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Watching Shark Tank tonight and the first presentation was by Mango Mango Preserves and it highlighted an interesting contrast in business trends today and how to capitalize on opportunities. <Spoiler Alert> Even though every one of the sharks was raving about the product samples they tried, with two of them going for second and third servings, none of them made a deal to invest in the company.
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Today, Monday, was the first day of the PASS Summit Preconference training events, but instead I spent the day at the free SQL in the City event put on by Red Gate.
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If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I have written several posts about how important I think it is to protect your source code, to version it, and in particular, all the aspects I like about Red Gate’s SQL Source Control product.
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Brian Moran (blog | Twitter) did a great presentation today for the PASS Professional Development Virtual Chapter on The Art of Questions. One of the points that Brian made was that there are good questions and bad (or at least not-as-good) questions.
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For six years I have been an avid and outspoken fan and paying customer of SourceGear products…from Vault to Dragnet to Fortress and on to Vault Professional, but that is all changing now.
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In the last couple of years I have conducted a lot of interviews for application and database developers for my company, and I can tell you that the little things can mean a lot.
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In my current position as Software Engineering Manager I have been through a lot of ups and downs with staffing, ranging from laying-off everyone who was on my team as we went through the great economic downturn in 2007-2008, to numerous rounds of interviewing and hiring contractors, full-time employees, and converting some contractors to employee status.
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“SELECT *” isn’t just hazardous to performance, it can actually return blatantly wrong information.
There are a number of blog posts and articles out there that actively discourage the use of the SELECT * FROM …syntax.
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So how do the new SQL Server Developer Tools (previously code-named Juneau) stack up against SQL Source Control? Read on to find out.
At the PASS Community Summit a couple of weeks ago, it was announced that the previously code-named Juneau software would be released under the name of SQL Server Developer Tools with the release of SQL Server 2012.
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Boy, how time flies! I can hardly believe that the 2011 PASS Summit is just one week away. Maybe it snuck up on me because it’s a few weeks earlier than last year.
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Another complaint that I made in Part 2 of my previous series on Red-Gate’s SQL Source Control tool was that the textbox to enter your check-in comments was only a single-line box.
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In part 2 of my previous series regarding Red-Gate’s tool, SQL Source Control, I warned about an aspect of the tool that could cause you to lose data if you were not careful.
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Everything worked fine for the last six years…and then today we hit the tipping point. I lost many hours today due to the misuse of DISTINCT which was the root cause of timeout errors in our web application.
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A lot of job candidates out there are wondering how they can set themselves apart from the crowd and increase the odds of landing the job they want. Well here’s a really easy way…
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Today I had to find a way to regain SysAdmin access to an instance of SQL Server when I technically had no permissions. Here is how I did that.
Every developer on my team is setup to be able to work 100% stand-alone.
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HOORAY! It is officially here! Today, Red-Gate officially released SQL Source Control version 2.1 with support for Vault.
While we have been happily and successfully running the beta version (a.k.a. the Early Access release) of Red-Gate SQL Source Control with support for Vault for quite a while, it is good to have the official RTM (or GOLD, or PROD, or whatever you call your “no-longer-in-beta”) release of the product.
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“HERESY!” you say, “Radio buttons are for single-select items! If you want multi-select, use checkboxes!” Well, I would agree, and that is why I consider this a significant bug that ASP.
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Two weeks ago I upgraded our installation of Fortress to the latest version, which is now named Vault Professional. This is the version of Vault (i.e. Vault Standard 5.1 / Vault Professional 5.
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I got pretty excited a couple of days ago when my new laptop arrived.
“The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here! I’m a somebody!”
- Steve Martin in The Jerk
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