I took my laptop computer with me to DevDays thinking that they'd probably have wireless internet access (WiFi) like they did during the PASS Community Summit. After all, it was in the same convention facility.
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Got home a little while ago from the largest attended MS DevDays event in the United States, with approximately 600 people. Of course that's not too surprising considering it was in Seattle, and the Microsoft campus is just across the lake.
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Went to another Blogger Meetup tonight. Couldn't stay very long, but it was good to re-connect with Anita, Jake, and Eric. Eric is getting a taste of the joys of being a freelance computer guy, including the thrills associated with the client making radical changes to the project over the weekend.
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I spent half my weekend in training. But not the kind that most people reading this would think of. This was what I'll refer to as Entrepreneur School. Training on being a better self-employed business person.
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In the comments to my post on running separate dev, test, and live databases, Karl raises a question about the build process and using source control. Well, first, if you've read my Script It!
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You DO backup your databases, don't you? And you do test your backups occasionally to make sure they're good, don't you?
One of my clients didn't, and they got bit hard recently.
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“You DO have a separate development environment, don't you?” I've made a comment like that a few times here on the blog, and to an experienced DBA it seems so obvious, but let's talk about it just to be sure (and for those people just starting their careers).
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Closely related to my Unpaid Vacation / Holiday Time post is the fact that when you're self employed, you don't get paid sick leave either. I am normally very healthy, but I was abruptly reminded of this subject last weekend when I got sick for 5 days, and I'm talking about the kind where you only have enough energy to roll over in bed, forget about sitting in front of a computer!
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A common question of those who are self-employed, and a common concern for those thinking about becoming self-employed is, “How do you find new business?” Here's how: You go out and look (and ask) for it.
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Whether 'tis nobler in the CPU to suffer the slings and arrows of outraged users... oh, never mind. Back to the topic at hand which really is all about how you modify your SQL Server objects.
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SET RANT ON
Oh boy, here we go again... This is ridiculous! A friend passed me a link to check out a tool called EZSQL. So I clicked on the link, and much to my surprise, my browser window was automatically resized from about 2/3 my screen size to fill up the ENTIRE screen.
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Have you ever seen a SELECT statement joining two tables that had something like and Field = Value in the JOIN clause? Did you, like me, ask yourself, "Why did they put that in the JOIN instead of in the WHERE clause?
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Microsoft Developer Days 2004 are coming! OK, this isn't SQL, it appears to really be more focused on .Net, but according to the latest SQLTeam poll, 73% of us are not primarily T-SQL or DBA folks, so you might be interested.
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Damian got hit by comment spam on his blog. So did I. Apparently they did a search for the phrases Title + Name + URL + Comments + “Remember Me“ which are the fields on the comment section of blogs powered by .
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SET EMBARASSMENT ON
Okay, I have to come clean, and do it as publicly as I did with my mistake. A couple of days ago in my My Favorite Rant posting, I accused some web sites of manipulating my system to add their site to my Favorites list in Internet Explorer.
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SET RANT ON
DAMMIT!!! Somebody's messin' with my Favorites, and I'm not happy about it! I've noticed this trend over the last couple of weeks. I'll browse to a site, oftentimes just one page because it was a link off of somebody's blog, I'll read the page, maybe I enjoy it, but rarely am I so enthralled with the writing that I want to bookmark the whole site.
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There are some topics that you know are always good for a heated debate: religion, politics, abortion, and the value of the MCDBA (Microsoft Certified DataBase Administrator) certification. I don't think I'll open the floodgates on the first three subjects here on my SQLTeam weblog, but the last one is a suitable subject.
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Eric Sink from SourceGear has a good article on MSDN about Making More Mistakes. This is an important concept for someone who wants to “go independent” and work for himself (or herself, don't get hung up on the syntax).
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There are essentially two types of billing for contract work: Fixed Bid or Time & Materials. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. And you'd better know up-front which one your client has in mind before you start talking about money.
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Oh the JOY of the Holiday Season! Maybe.
We are just winding down the big holiday season in the U.S. which seems to start about noon on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving (fourth Thursday of November), and wraps up the Monday after New Year's Day.
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