In response to Tom LaRock’s Meme Monday, I’m writing about working with deadlines. I’m going to take the developer approach and talk in terms of new project deadlines. My favorite approach...

Tom LaRock (b|t) is back with another Meme Monday, and this month the meme is, “What gift do you want Microsoft to leave for you under the tree this year?” My gut reaction was to ask for a...

Contributing to Thomas LaRock’s Meme Monday, I offer my thoughts on #SQLFamily in haiku form: Family of friends bound by passion, vision, love. Success is cheered on. I know this doesn’t exactly...

Set the Wayback Machine It was a year ago, October 2010, when I first decided I wanted to go to the PASS Summit. I asked for my company to cover the costs, and I was denied. I could hardly blame them –...

Sometime in 2004, I had to revise a well-established import process that was clogging up the production SQL server with gooey slowness. The size of the data we were loading had grown dramatically since...

This review is part one of a twelve-part series of book reviews I have committed to writing over the next twelve months (read the list and the reasons for making it here: “What Gets Measured Gets...

This was the second time I failed a certification exam, and the first time I expected to fail. It’s also the first time I’ve been perfectly content with failing. I took the MCTS 70-448 –...

Bing bong! In between announcements from our cruise director Julie, Buck Woody imparted some words of wisdom to our SQL Cruise group: What gets measured gets done. In other words, the things we track are...