The first part of this series is here . I started this role with high expectations and with a vague sense of how I wanted to approach each of my customers.  Then I found this : (Please, go visit http://www.brentozar.com , go now, go soak in all the...

Today is the next meme Monday, and the topic is all about what “SQLFamily” means to you. I actually first heard the term when I went to Pass Summit 2011 just a mere month ago.  But I had already felt the beginnings of it online. I actually got to...

Who are your customers?  Are they well-defined?  What are the SLA’s that you must adhere to?  What are their pain points, real and perceived?  What are your actual pain points when dealing with their systems? I was very lucky in that...

So, it’s that time of year again.  Time to reinstall the laptop.  Clean it of all the accumulated cruft and start over with a fresh install. And, amazingly enough, this time I figured out what the issue was with WLW posting to Technet. ...

Ok, this is a really cool tool for managers and PM's in your org. It's free, but requires the PowerPivot addin for Excel from here . http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=4c13a670-3356-4d4a-a24b-d33143004eb6 The only downside...

So I haven’t officially started as DBA yet, but I did get to debug why our web servers couldn’t contact our SQL Server cluster. Several failed fail-overs, and reboots later, it again turned out that the active node did not have an exception in the firewall...

Let me introduce myself. My name is Dale Hirt, and I am an Operations Engineer for Developer Division.  I am moving into a dba role with the same team, and it is an exciting transition. I am a hometown boy, as I was born and raised in the Pacific...