SQL Obsession: Smells like a sweet contest

My wife says I should start with something witty, but since I can’t think of anything I’ll give a little background first. I grew up in small town Colorado, I met my wife in Chicago where I attended college and lived for over 7 years. We returned to Colorado before the birth of our first… Read More »

Motorola Droid v1 Rooted

So first I should put a standard disclaimer: This process will void your warranty and possibly “brick” you phone. Only attempt this if you’re willing to accept the risk. I’ve had my original Motorola Droid for over a year and a half now and I still love it. Up until now I didn’t want to… Read More »

2011: The Year of Focus

It’s that time of year when people promise to themselves to lose weight, stop smoking, and stop writing cursors. This month’s TSQL Tuesday topic is about the latter, habits or things you’d change as a DBA. If you’re new to SQL Server you may not be aware that the amount of knowledge out there is… Read More »

Tabula Recta Generator

Inspired by the Lifehacker article of “How to Write Down and Encrypt Your Passwords with an Old-School Tabula Recta” I have thrown together my own web-based Tabula Recta generator. This is a just a quick proof of concept. I don’t shift the characters but generate a random character from a limited character set (abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxys0123456789!@#$%^&*()+_-{}|;<>?) using… Read More »

Breaking into Information Technology (one approach)

Was talking with my wife about the “good ‘ol days”. Small apartment, going to school, trying to make ends meet. Those were the days shortly before the dot com bubble burst. At that point I was fighting against being in I.T. because EVERYONE was going into the field. Oddly enough every  job I got at… Read More »

Why are DBA skills necessary? #TSQL2sDay

Finally taking the plunge. First time blogger to T-SQL Tuesday here. I would have to start by saying that as I’ve grown in DBA skill and knowledge coming from the dark side (developers) I can see right off the bat some skills that are critical. Here are just some basic examples (near and dear to… Read More »

Getting Things Done (So Far)

It’s been about a month since I’ve completed the book on “Getting Things Done” by David Allen and integrated lists into my organizational process. It’s a quick read (200 pages) and if you don’t want to buy it I found my copy readily available at my local library. In this whole process of re-organization I… Read More »

UDFs And Why Do I Care? Part One

A UDF is a User Defined Function in SQL Server. You can develop the function using T-SQL or your favorite .NET language (C#, VB, etc). For Part One I’m going to talk about Scalar UDFs. Scalar UDFs are functions that return a single value only. There are a couple limitations to what UDFs can and can’t… Read More »

Category: SQL

PSA: Sleep Apnea

This is more of a public service post than anything, but I thought I’d share in case there was anyone else out there experiencing some of these symptoms and wondering if they should do a sleep study. Initially (4 years ago) I went to the doctor because I was experiencing severe headaches in the morning… Read More »