Welcome to T-SQL Tuesday #100. In a community filled with ADD people like the SQL community (myself included), who would have guessed that T-SQL Tuesday would still be going strong years later? Other attempts at similar recurring themed posts have been attempted (I can’t even remember their names), but none had the staying power of T-SQL Tuesday. I have enjoyed writing blogs for the event and even hosted a couple of times. Fittingly, the host for T-SQL Tuesday #100 is ..read more

It’s hard to believe that we have reached T-SQL Tuesday #99 already. This month’s host is Aaron Bertrand (blog|@AaronBertrand), and he is giving us 2 choices to choose from for the theme of our posts. Door #1 is about #sqlibrium or what you are passionate about outside of SQL Server and data. Or if you’d rather keep your post technical rather than personal, door #2 is to write about T-SQL bad habits. For my contribution, I have elected to go ..read more

It’s a new year, and if you read my post almost 2 week’s ago, you know that I’ve already started making changes. What you may not have realized is that the job change was an important step in realizing the changes I had resolved to make. This list is a simple one: Spend less time working. Spend more time with my wife and our dog ..read more

Naming no names here, but I want to talk about a really horrible sales call I had recently. Well, the horribleness started with the call, but continued afterward. There was part of me that wanted to tell the vendor during the call to put their software someplace protected from the sun and hang up on them, but I didn’t. I want to tell others about this vendor’s sales process so they don’t make the same mistakes this one did. Here ..read more

A little less than 2 years ago, my wife and I loaded up our cats and dog and moved from the Seattle area on the west coast to New York City on the east coast. It was quite an experience. Turns out the old saying was true. More money did not equal more happiness. So now we are embarking on road trip part 2 ..read more

Time Zones were definitely being a drag today. I got an email from one of the developers at work asking about the performance difference between 2 queries. The only difference between the 2 queries is that one of them uses the AT TIME ZONE clause that was added in SQL Server 2016. I have not played around with this particular clause, but we do store quite a bit of data in the datetimeoffset data type. In the table in the ..read more

A lot of people have made a difference in my career. A LOT! I don’t think we ever thank those that make a difference as much as we should. Often, it’s not until years later when you look back on your career and reflect on how you got from where you used to be to where you are now that you really realize how much help you had along the way. Sometimes that help is incidental or accidental ..read more

Thanks to everybody who attended my webcast Troubleshooting SQL Server Connection Issues yesterday. If you missed it, the recording will be available soon on the MSSQL Tips website. The slide deck and demo code will also be available with the recording, or you can download it below. Slide deck: TroubleshootingSQLServerConnectionIssues ..read more

In case you missed, I started a new blog series several weeks ago called 5 Tips for Friday on SQL Server Best Practices. Every Friday I post a set of 5 best practices on a particular topic. The topic changes from week-to-week. This week’s topic is database configurations: 5 Tips for Friday ..read more

If you have worked with me or are a frequent reader of my blogs or a frequent attendee of my presentations, you know I hate doing things manually. Over my career, I have found that one of the biggest enemies of automation is being able to get someone else to do it manually. If you can get someone else to do the work, it’s not your problem, right? I have seen manual processes linger on for years when it could ..read more