Month: February 2007

Nick Randolph made an interesting point. But first let me say that it’s great that the Perth .Net group are doing this at all. It’s a great move to develop a stronger community, and one that I would love to see happen in Adelaide some time. My problem with organising something like this is that I’m not in the city often enough, but I will try to encourage other people in the Adelaide user-groups to set up something like this. Back to Nick’s point though… In case you’ve just read through his post and are wondering what I’m talking about, … Continue reading Topics for coffee meetings

Paul Turner is an Adelaide guy I know well. He’s been a trainer at Kaz for quite a while, is on the local ACS executive committee with me and has been involved in the local .Net user-group too. He’s had a couple of major lifestyle changes in the last couple of weeks. Most significantly, he’s become a father, but also he’s become a Readifarian (and word is getting out!). All very cool, and Paul is justified in being excited. I think the two changes will work hand-in-hand very nicely, as Readify will probably have him doing a lot of his … Continue reading Paul Turner

Sometimes you want to make changes to your SQL Server objects (like tables, indexes, whatever), and you figure that it will be worth recreating them with a different set of options. One way of doing this is to generate a script, and then use a text manipulator to change the script in a way that will make it just what you want. But I quite like querying the object catalog views – you know, those tables like sys.objects. Here’s an example of a script which will generate a create statement for each of the clustered indexes on user-tables in my … Continue reading Scripting database objects a different way

It’s amazing how coffee can be conducive to community. Community is about sharing, it’s about developing passion and enthusiasm, it’s about friendship. And coffee is too. The age-old invite – “Let’s do coffee” – is a great way to sit down with someone. It’s cheaper and less formal than lunch, and it doesn’t stop you driving home like beer would. I think it’s really exciting that the Perth .Net Community of Practice (mainly Nick Randolph, Alastair Waddell and Mitch Wheat) have set up a weekly cafe catch-up. More about it here. Mauricio Freitas has often written about the group of … Continue reading Coffee and Community

Here’s the link: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/sp2.mspx There are so many cool things about SP2. It’s not just about bug-fixes, there are new add-ins for Office and SharePoint, and a few Feature Pack of goodies! Definitely worth checking out. 

I’m going to find this topic very interesting when I’m training people more and more. Kathy Sierra gives us four questions to judge someone’s passion for their work: When was the last time you read a trade/professional journal or book related to your work? (can substitute “attended an industry conference or took a course”) Name at least two of the key people in your field. If you had to, would you spend your own money to buy tools or other materials that would improve the quality of your work? If you did not do this for work, would you still … Continue reading 4 questions to evaluate people’s passion

Many of us have been searching though images for Jim Gray since he went missing three weeks ago. But now his family and friends have suspended the search. It’s very sad, and I’m sure we will all maintain a bit of hope that he’s still alive somehow. He was a legend in the database world, one of the greats. More information can be found at http://research.microsoft.com/news/featurestories/publish/Gray.aspx

I’m sure this won’t be the case for long, Microsoft tend to be good about addressing things like this. Fellow MVP Sandi Hardmeier has put out a very detailed post about the problem, I suggest you read about it there. It does raise some interesting questions. Not least, how are we supposed to protect ourselves against these things? I think her suggestion about making sure that you close unexpected windows using the ‘x’ in the corner is a good one. And making sure that you have firewalls and virus checkers is an absolute must. Using the ‘hosts file’ protection against … Continue reading Malware distributed by MSN Messenger banner ads

A lot of people seem to have been asking about this recently. They have a T-SQL query which uses a call to row_number() within a CTE or derived table, and uses this row_number() field to filter the results to a single page – but they also want to know how many rows were in the whole set (rather than just in the page). @@rowcount doesn’t do it for them, because this will return the number of rows in that page. Something like this: select * from   (select *, row_number() over (order by employeeid) as rn from dbo.Employees) ewhere rn … Continue reading Querying the total number of records, but only returning a page of them

If you’re in Melbourne during the last week of March and want to learn about how to effectively write queries for SQL Server, then this course is for you. The course was written by Itzik Ben-Gan, who is one of the legends in the SQL Server world (and now my colleague!), so it’s a very high quality course. And of course, it’s not as if I’m new to the material myself, having been involved in helping people learn about T-SQL for many years myself. I’m really pleased that this is the first course I’ll be teaching under the banner of … Continue reading My first Solid Quality course is scheduled