Over the past several years, I've regularly blogged about SQL Server and other technologies, and sometimes about life in general. I enjoy sharing my experiences and love it when something I've written evokes a good conversation in the comments section of the blog.
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Yesterday, I was catching up on some blogs that I regularly read and noticed one that got me to really thinking. It was written by fellow SQL Server enthusiast and blogger extrodenaire Brent Ozar.
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I was recently tagged by my long-time friend and colleague Kevin Kline in his blog post Things You Know Now. The thread originated with Mike Walsh, in his blog post also entitled Things You Know Now.
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So, you are considering upgrading to SQL Server 200x from a previous version. What are some of the key issues that you need to consider, or at least be made aware of, prior to upgrading?
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Yesterday I posted a short blog about DevLink in the middle Tennessee area. Today, I'd like to make sure that you're aware of another great event in the great northwest - DevTeach/SQLTeach.
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For those of you who are not familiar with DevLink, you should be. It's Middle Tennessee's premier developer and database conference. It attracts some of the best speakers from all over North America, yet it provides a comfortable and relaxed environment where attendees and speakers can have a fun time just hanging out and getting to know one another.
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Licensing models can sometimes make database modeling seem trivial. Per processor or per seat? Single core, dual-core, multi-core processors? Multiple instances on one server? Virtualizing servers on a single server? It can get very confusing, very quickly.
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Despite the best laid plans, sometimes circumstances or project scope change and the definition of one or more tables in your database must be altered after they have been created. It's just a fact of life for a DBA.
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The past couple of years has seen a great increase in the interest of server consolidation and virtualization. Once considered an almost impossible to achieve ideal, today more and more companies are taking a serious look at its benefits.
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Happy New Years! (noise makers sounding in the background, confetti and streamers softly floating down behind me). I hope you all had a wonder New Year's Day holiday. Now it's back to work.
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As I type this, I've just sat down at the Press/Bloggers table in the General Session are waiting for the keynote address. The lights have dimmed and the smoke machine has begun pumping fog onto the stage.
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Wayne Snyder, the president of PASS, entered the stage on a Harley-Davidson Fat-Boy. "Welcome to the world's biggest conference for the world's biggest database!" he yells as "Born to be Wild" blares over the PA system.
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Yesterday I attended the PASS Volunteer Training Day; a concept that started a couple of years ago. It's a day when all of the volunteers that make PASS work throughout the year come together for training, discussions, brainstorming, and education.
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I just voted in the PASS 2008 Board of Directors elections. I can tell you the decision was not an easy one. And I'm glad! The SQL Server community is a rather close knit group of people.
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The 2008 PASS Community Summit begins next week. It's probably one of the best weeks of my professional year. There is, of course, lots and lots and lots of great technical training.
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Sometimes, SQL Server Reporting Services users like to see what could be considered multiple reports in a single SSRS report. In most cases we can easily accomplish this using more than one data region in the report.
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I was recently doing a little research on scaling out SQL Server Reporting Services and found these articles. I thought I'd share them with you here (and so I could quickly find them again later if I needed to).
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Early this morning, Bob Ward of Microsoft PSS SQL Support fame authored a post on the PSS Support blog entitled "SQL Server Support in a Hardware Virtualization Environment". As always, Bob's comments are helpful.
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Sometimes it's useful to disable one or more constraints on a table, do something significant, and then re-enable the constaint(s) after you're done. This is most often done to improve performance during a bulk load operation.
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My latest Simple-Talk article is live. It's entitled Using Covering Indexes to Improve Query Performance. Let me know what you think and if you'd like to see more articles/postings on similar topics.
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