As an update to our current round of SQLskills community mentoring (round 4 – see post here), Joe and Erin are now mentoring people they’ve met at Immersion Events here in Chicago. Joe will be mentoring Riley Logan, who attended IE2 in Chicago last week and IE1 in Bellevue last summer.  In his own words: [...]

As a counterpart to my recent survey on what the oldest version of SQL Server you have in production (see the results here), I kicked off a survey last week asking what the newest version of SQL Server is that you have in production. Here are the results: I’m not surprised by these results, and [...]

We’ve had a mentoring program here at SQLskills for a couple of years (the brainchild of Jonathan), where each of us can pick someone who’s attended one of our Immersion Events in the past and offer to be their mentor for six months. It’s time to kick off the fourth mentoring session. You can read [...]

Last week I kicked off a survey asking what is the oldest version of SQL Server you have in production. Here are the results: I’m actually quite surprised. While I expected to see a sizable percentage of businesses still with SQL Server 2000 in production, I didn’t expect it to be almost half of all respondents [...]

As you may know, we have a mentoring program here at SQLskills (the brainchild of Jonathan), where each of us can pick someone who's attended one of our Immersion Events in the past and offer to be their mentor for six months. It's time to kick off the third mentoring session. You can read about [...]

We've only just hired Glenn Berry in May, yet demand dictates that we hire another SQL guru to join our close-knit, expert team. Specifically, we’ve asked well-known SQL expert and MVP Erin Stellato to join us and we're extremely pleased that she accepted our offer. She'll become employee #7 when she starts with us on [...]

Back in November last year I blogged about Jonathan's idea to mentor someone who's attended one of our classes and how Jonathan, Joe, and I each picked someone to mentor for six months. Our mentees (Steven Ormrod, Luke Jian, and Brad Hoff, respectively) have all said how much they've benefited from the arrangement and we've [...]

This is becoming a habit – we're expanding yet again! It's been a quick 6 months since Joe Sack came on board and we've been having a blast together. Business is steadily increasing so we need to grow again and hire the next member of our close-knit, expert team. Specifically, we've asked well-known industry expert [...]

I love getting questions in email about SQL Server. I tell every class that they can send me questions and they'll get a response – sometimes just a URL to read, sometimes I engage for hours if it's a really interesting bug, for instance. It's a great way to help the community, it fosters good will [...]

Yes, really. So what? Several times in the last week I've heard of people denigrating anyone who is still running SQL Server 2000 (paraphrasing): How can they possibly still be running on a version that old? Why on Earth haven't they upgraded? *Everyone's* on something more recent. 2000 is old and sucky, so you guys [...]

Cue spooky music… I used to love the X-Files, where one of the catch-phrases was Trust No One. Their other major catch-phrase was The Truth Is Out There. Yes, it is – but you're likely going to come up against all kinds of obstacles to finding it, just like Agent Mulder did. Now, searching for [...]

I was searching around in the US Patent Office database this evening to find my patent for consistency checking of a backup without restoring the backup, for a Twitter conversation I was having, when I discovered that another one I filed before leaving Microsoft was granted in late 2009. The new one was part of [...]

I came across an excellent blog post on twitter today: 10 ways you know you’re with smart people. Go read it. If the top-10 describes you then you should be proud IMHO.

Kimberly recently spent a bunch of time redesigning our popular laptop stickers (those old black and white ones are now the "classic" stickers – look for them on eBay :-) We have *lots* of them and they're all for you. We'll be handing these out at events (e.g. SQL Connections, SQL Saturday #67 Chicago, SQL Saturday #73 [...]

Today is a very exciting day for us here at SQLskills.com as we take the first step at growing as a company instead of solely partnering with other consultants with their own companies. While we value our partnerships and plan to continue many, we also value the benefits brought by having a small and dedicated [...]

Back when I was at Microsoft, I witnessed Steve Balmer doing his mad "Developers, developers, developers, developers!" mantra a few times. (Checkout this video of him doing it here.) Here at SQLskills.com, our mantra is "Community, community, community, community!". You guys out there recognized that and voted us the #2 SQL company that's "doing it right" [...]

Anywhere in the world? If you do and you'd like a SQLskills swag-pack (cups, pens, laptop stickers), drop me an email (paul@sqlskills.com) and let me know your average attendance and your address and we'll get some stuff in the post for you. Cheers

I've noticed a few new SQL blogs spring up over the last month or so and someone asked me on Facebook this morning about linking etiquette so I thought I'd lay out a few quick thoughts I have on the subject – some "dos", mostly "don'ts" – as general advice for successfully blogging in the [...]

We'd like to thank you all for reading all our stuff all year, for coming to our classes and conference sessions, and for being our friends. So to say thank you (and to torture you!) I wrote some SQL – Christmas carols and persuaded Kimberly to join me in the fun. And so we present [...]

A quickie… this morning I've been writing a bunch of T-SQL code (yes, occasionally I'm allowed to do that :-) and I needed to programmatically check whether backup compression is enabled on a SQL Server 2008 instance. I futzed about for a few minutes with sp_configure and I was starting to think of a temp table [...]

This evening I was reading an article in The Washington Post called Twelve Things The World Should Toss Out and it inspired me to start a new blog chain about the top-5 things in SQL Server we all wish would just be removed from the product once and for all. Here are mine in order of evil-ness: [...]

(Be sure to join our community to get our monthly newsletter with exclusive content, advance notice of classes with discount codes, and other SQL Server goodies!)   SQL Server 2008 R2 has been out for a while now (see http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2.aspx) and many people are trying it out. One word of caution: any database attached to a [...]

Thanks to the attention of some scurrilous parasites, all comments will now be moderated. And to said parasites, please be aware that there's no point spamming my blog with comments linking to your websites as no-one will ever see them now. And I've contacted your hosting companies with your IP addresses, and a copy of [...]

There's another DBA 'chain-blog' going around, this time started by Tim Ford, and I was tagged by Tom LaRock. The idea is that you're stuck on a desert island for six months with WiFi and you have to spend it doing something related to work. What would you spend the six months doing? If I [...]

Go to www.wordle.net/create and enter a URL. Here's what it thinks of my current blog homepage: Cool!

A sad, tear-jerky story about how a socially-inept, stay-at-home shut-in, SQL expert gets a new lease of life and finds he really does have friends out in the big world after all. LOL. Not. I'm definitely not socially-inept – managed to persuade Kimberly to marry me, right? Well, that was really down to the classic pick-up [...]

I was in a discussion earlier today, and it's one I've had lots of times in the past – both inside and outside Microsoft and the SQL team: why doesn't SQL Server do automatic <defrag, index creation, refactoring, de/normalization, backups, CHECKDBs, etc>? Some of these were considered while I was still on the team, and [...]

People are saying they can't find me – that's a Twitter issue with indexing. Here's the direct link: http://twitter.com/PaulRandal and Kimberly's at http://twitter.com/KimberlyLTripp

After being mercilessly pressurized by many people (and I blame Jason Massie the most), I've joined Twitter and I'll be commenting lots on it. Why did I finally cave? Well, I've been seeing lots of little things in forums and newsgroups that don't merit a full blog post but are worth letting people know about. [...]

This feels like a bit of a strange post for me to make, but I want to make it anyway, and don't take it the wrong way… I've recently started following SQLBatman's blog and I was astounded that he had to post a follow-up to his list of SQL blogger rankings (disclaimer: including ours – [...]

Not an April Fool (although SQL Server Central has a great one) – Kimberly and I were both re-awarded MVP status for another year – cool! Don't expect any blog posts this week from either of us – we're on vacation with the kids down on St. Pete beach in Florida. Back to work next [...]

Just noticed this come up on my Facebook news feed – how to code assignment statements when programming (not in T-SQL): if (foo == 4) then … if (4 == foo) then … #1 is the most natural way to write the conditional expression, but has a *massive* potential for introducing bugs that are very, [...]

There's a long-running discussion with people tagging each other to post advice for people new to SQL Server, about what they know now and wished they'd known ealier in their lives/careers – lot's of SQL MVPs and other luminaries have been doing it and I've been tagged now by my good friend Ward Pond – [...]

One of the opinions that was expressed yesterday by our developer friends (a bunch of Regional Directors – and look, Kimberly's the featured RD today on http://theregion.com/) is that SQL Server is just plumbing. Consider the developers (or app architects) as plumbers. They see SQL Server as a few pieces of copper pipe joining a [...]

As you may have been seeing over the last few weeks, there are intermittent errors in some parts of mine and Kimberly's blogs. Our hosting site and our blog guy have figured out that there's an ASP version mismatch which is causing the problems – and they're going to fix it this week. So – [...]

It’s become something of a tradition for me to do a Valentine’s Day blog post (the 2008 one about SQL Server blogs is at Wow – so many blogs!) as we don’t do anything special otherwise – I don’t need a “Hallmark Holiday” to tell Kimberly I love her :-). Ahem – well this year I’m [...]

Thanks for your patience while our blog engine back-end was updated. You should find that the response time is much better now. You'll notice that all the blog post URLs have changed – we have a conversion layer in place so all prior blog posts will be seamlessly accessible through their new and old URLs. [...]

Just a quick post to say that all our blogs and the SQLskills.com website is moving to a new software backend this coming Wednesday through Friday. All the URLs and links will remain the same after the move, but there may be some short periods during that time that the blogs won't be available. No [...]

Fixed now – thanks so much! Folks – a couple of people have setup their systems to refresh *all* our category feeds every five minutes – this is putting an undue load on our server (and screws up our server stats). I know I post a lot but not *that* often. I’ve WHOIS’d the IP [...]

Last year I posted on my old blog about the active SQL Server team blogs. I just happened to post on February 14th and so in every class Kimberly teaches, she makes fun of how romantic I was to post that on Valentine's Day. So what better thing to post this year than an update [...]

Despite the fact that I was in the Storage Engine, and there’s always been humorous rivalry between the Storage Engine team and the Relational Engine (a.k.a. the Query Processor) team, I did actually get along with some of the QP guys :-) One of my good friends, Conor Cunningham, has been wanting to get back [...]

Ok – this post is a little strange and fun. I was thinking about word length and how it relates to designing software/schemas to support multiple-languages. How far do you have to go in your research to figure out the maximum string length to support? So I started digging about and found some interesting things [...]

Thanks for your patience and to all those who emailed to let me know. All the SQLskills.com blogs have been updated to the latest dasBlog version and everything’s working again. I’d appreciate you taking the time to go back and re-enter any comments you tried to over the last few days. Thanks!

It gives me great pleasure to announce two new additions to the SQLskills team – Stacia Misner and Simon Sabin. Stacia’s a BI expert who will be working alongside Liz Vitt, and Simon’s a developer expert who will be working alongside Bob Beauchemin. Bringing Stacia and Simon on-board really strengthens the capabilities of the SQLskills [...]

It’s not like me to post on security – that’s one of Kimberly’s areas - but this is an interesting example of a real-life injection attack :-)

Well, now I’m no longer a ‘Softie’. It feels a little strange after having been on the SQL team for 8.5 years but I’m really jazzed about all the stuff we’ll be doing over the next year and more here at SQLskills. We’re taking a small vacation before diving in – first thing I’ll be doing [...]