Imported Content

What is Your Biggest Weakness?

David Stein started a fun little game of blog tag and zapped Brent Ozar who, in turn, zapped me. The challenge here is to answer the interview question “What is your biggest weakness?” David’s answer was that he loves to jump straight into code. Brent’s answer is that he only wants to do things that he can do better than everyone else and only if he can do it quickly (Brent is what I call a Type A Slacker).

Links for the Week of 2009.12.04

SQL Server Kendal Van Dyke: Delegation: What It Is And How To Set It Up – The title says it all, folks. wmarow’s disk & disk array calculator – Storage calculator. This wouldn’t be terribly fascinating, except I know the performance characteristics of our I/O subsystem and when I plug in the variables, this is pretty close to real life performance. (Not directly SQL Server related, but it’s my blog so it goes where I wants it.

How Do You Use SQL Server

Grant Fritchey took it upon himself to tag me in his most recent blog post abouthow we use SQL Server. The best part about this is I was just hired Senior DBA, so I can write with the unbridled enthusiasm of someone who is showing off a new car. Here’s a little bit of background – my employer provides freight, utility, and telecom expense management services. In short, we pay your bills, we hand key your bills, we figure out how to EDI your bills – we do everything we can to process as many bills as possible every second of every day of the year.

SQL Server Presenters on Twitter

I put out a call a while back for a list of SQL Server presenters who are on twitter. A fair number of people responded. I kept it quiet because I was busy doing my day job, but I was secretly plotting… Plotting to put this list together and share it worth the world! (evil laughter) Not only did I put this list on my blog, I also put it on twitter.

Links for the Week 2009.11.20

Bonus link dump week! Since I haven’t done one of these in several weeks, some of these links go all the way back to October 29th, enjoy. SQL SERVER Suggested Max Memory Settings for SQL Server 2005/2008 – Windows Live – Ever wonder how to set up the max memory settings for SQL Server? On our production instances we use fixed settings, but I’m going to revisit those settings now that I’m armed with this information.

GUIDs: Not Necessarily Unique

So, you though that GUIDs were supposed to be unique, eh? You aren’t alone. A lot of people assume that GUIDs are unique. Hell, unique is in the name! On Friday, I had a bug report filed about a UNIQUE constraint violation. Seeing as how I had bigger fish to fry, and this functionality is only rarely used, I put it aside until this morning when I took a closer look at the bug report and the code in question.

Shameless Self Promotion

OR HOW TO GET YOURSELF ADOPTED FROM THE ANIMAL SHELTER A Trip to the Humane Society Way back in 2001, I took a trip to the local humane society. Ostensibly, I was going there with my girlfriend at the time to look at kittens. We were resolved about not getting a cat that day. This story wouldn’t be interesting if we didn’t get a cat, so I’ll spoil the ending for you and let you know that we did take a cat home that day.

Volunteering with PASS

The PASS Summit just wrapped up and I’m riding a giant wave of excitement about the entire organization, not just the summit. I met so many great people over the last week who were excited to be a part of PASS. On top of that, there were even more people who asked how they could get involved in PASS. Locally You can start off by volunteering locally. This is probably the easiest way to get involved with the organization.

Links for the Week of 2009.10.30

These are a day late. Sorry about that. It’s been one helluva week. Also, November 1st marks the beginning of National Novel Writing Month. So, if you’ve had a story inside you waiting to get out, wait no further! SQL Server Find the complete call tree for a stored procedure – Linchi Shea shares a perl script that will attempt to determine the full call stack of a single stored procedure.

Links for the Week of 2009.10.23

I came across a lot of great links in the last week. So many that I had to cut about 40% of them to make this list. As always, you can check out the firehose at my delicious bookmarks page. SQL Server CSS SQL Server Engineers : SQL Server Urban Legends Discussed – Common SQL Server myths discussed and dispelled by premier support services. SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) – Best Practices – Part 1 – Getting started in SSIS is hard enough.