Following up on my comments on Brent's post about international outsourcing, Dell recently announced that they are pulling back some of the customer support that they had directed to India. It turns out that some customers were not happy with the quality of the support they were getting.
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Believe it or not, when you're self-employed, the IRS can be your friend (well, sort of). For those outside the United States, the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) is the federal-level tax authority in the USA.
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So you want to be your own boss. Tired of someone else telling you what you have to do? Ready to break-free and do it YOUR way? Good for you! Congratulations!
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As Graz said in his presentation at the 2003 PASS Summit, "I'm a consultant. Therefore I have an opinion on that." I have a lot of opinions on how business should be done.
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OK, yesterday I ranted about Guy Brown's opening of the PASS conference. And in case it wasn't clear, let me state what I hoped would be obvious: That was not an attack on Guy.
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BEGIN RANT
I had a great time at the 2003 PASS Community Summit in Seattle. It was a valuable use of my time. But what should have started with a bang, instead began with a fizzle.
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During his keynote talk Wednesday morning, Gordon Mangione (VP SQL Server, Microsoft) said to his assistant who was about to demonstrate a new feature in Yukon, “If you login as SA, Blank Password, you're fired.
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To answer Scoble's question, the recent TPC-C benchmarks that MS is proclaiming were run on a 64-way, 64-bit machine with 1/2 TB of RAM. I'm pretty sure I heard Gordon Magnione say this in his keynote at PASS.
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In my previous post on Reporting Services I mentioned that other report makers like Crystal and Lockwood Tech would not be happy. I'll modify that a little bit to say that some users will be happy with products like Lockwood's SQLWebReports because it is easy to setup and use.
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I'm pretty upset with myself this morning. In just about 15 minutes, the general session for today will get started, and I'm not there. I made a bad choice a couple of months ago when I decided to register for only one day of the conference.
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Went to two sessions on Reporting Services for SQL 2000 today. This looks like it will really be a great tool. Gordon Mangione announced that the developers are targeting to have it out by the end of the year, and he said to expect it around "December 60th".
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I didn't make any official study of this, but I did notice that in the only two sessions (one of them being the Keynote by Microsoft Vice President Gordon Mangione) where I heard a .
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Gordon Mangione just announced that last night they posted a new SQL Best Practices Analyzer available on the website. I didn't see it when I just did a quick scan, but look for it.
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Day 2: Tuesday
Just got home a little while ago from the Welcome Reception and post-func activities. The Welcome Reception was okay. It had some free food. I made little roast beef sandwiches with the rolls they had there.
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I previously blogged about my fears that making the .NET languages available in Yukon might lead to horrible stored procedures by people who don't understand the difference between set-based and iterative processing.
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The Seattle Sheraton has WiFi access in its lobby, which was cool. I tried to connect here to post a quick blog from there with my Palm Tungsten C which has WiFi, but as I was logging into my blog I got a Fatal Error which required hitting the reset button on the back.
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I'm sure the sessions on Yukon today were great, but I didn't go so I can't tell you. But then again, I was reminded that I wouldn't have been able to tell you anyway because Microsoft was making people sign NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements).
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Here are links to a two part article that I wrote last year forSQLTeam on the subject of Upgrading from SQL Server 7 to 2000.
Part 1: Overview
Part 2: Task List and Scripts
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Oh, here's a couple of other things... First, I'm not going to either of the "pre-conference" seminars (which cost extra). So I don't expect to have anything for Days 1 and 2.
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Today, Sunday, was really Day 0 of the PASS 2003 Community Summit here in Seattle. The only thing going on for the convention today was that the registration desk was open for those who were here early and wanted to get checked in.
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