Celebrating the first day of Summer with the first technical post on the blog since mid-Winter (apologies for my absence).. Jens has a great post regarding the internal behavior of various forms of sp_-named programmability objects. Some SQLRAP-related research led me to take a different tack, and...

This page will serve as a compendium of Pond’s Laws posts. The individual posts which promulgate the laws may be found as follows: Pond's First through Tenth Laws Pond's Eleventh Law Pond's Twelfth Law Pond's Thirteenth Law Pond's Laws of System Design (or, How To Be A Competent Professional...

Thanks to yet another kick-in-the-pants from Jimmy May (did he play soccer as a youth?) the Pond’s Laws Home Page is now live. Jimmy wanted to find all of Pond’s Laws in one place, and now he (and you) can. There’s also a link to the new page in the A Bit More From Me section to your left (if you...

Herewith, a discussion of the emergence of Pond’s Thirteenth Law (if you need to catch up, here are Laws One through Ten , Eleven , and Twelve , as well as three ruminations on the implications of Pond’s Seventh Law ).. One of the great things about my job is that I get to spend an embarrassing amount...

Two Microsoft folks frequently featured in this space, Microsoft Certified Masters Jimmy May and Jens Suessmeyer , have joined forces to bring to the world SQLIOSimParser, a tool to parse and interpret the XML output of the Bob Dorr’s SQLIOSim testing tool. Jimmy says Jens did most of the heavy lifting...

After a long hiatus , Pond’s Laws of System Design (or, How to Be a Competent Professional in an Irrational World) returns. Thanks to Jimmy May for a kick-in-the-pants on this topic several months ago; I hope he’ll understand why I just had to wait until right now to publish this post (the clue lies...

Courtesy of Jens Suessmeyer comes this little gem purloined from an internal discussion; cut-and-paste this into SQL Server Management Studio and see if you can answer the questions in the comments before you execute the script: --   create and populate a table variable DECLARE @Demonstration TABLE...

Last week I was tagged by Jorge Segarra (a/k/a @SQLChicken) in a meme started by Chris Shaw , who asked a great question about leaders in one’s career.  In reflecting on my response , it occurred to me that there was only one of the people I listed who it was possible for me to be in touch with...

Consider this post a parable about what can happen if you let Twitter into your life.. I spent part of my day researching a particular capability of the TechSmith Camtasia Studio software my colleague Venkata Raj Pochiraju has been using to record readiness materials for our upcoming SQLRAP 2.5 release...

UPDATED 25 April 2009 to fix the link to Jimmy’s blog As a consequence of my recent ascension to Twitterato-hood (follow me @sqltwit), I’ve made several new SQL friends over the last couple of weeks.  One of those is Jorge Segarra (a/k/a @SQLChicken in the Twitterverse), a SQL DBA and Systems administrator...

TechNet magazine has released a web-only “Green IT” edition as a companion piece to Mark Pohto’s recent white paper and article in The Architecture Journal. The issue features a valuable collection of new and archived articles on energy efficient computing, including: · Framework for Building a “Hyper...

Sad news today that Jong Ku Kim, a Premier Field Engineer with Microsoft Services, on Tuesday lost an 18-month battle with cancer at the age of 39.  He leaves behind a wife, a seven year-old, son, family, friends, and a globe-spanning cadre of colleagues who all mourn his untimely passing. I first...

UPDATED 13 April 2009: The SAPWD parameter sets the sa password; use BLANKSAPWD if you don’t wish to set one.  I’ve updated the seventh paragraph below accordingly. One of our responsibilities in the ITOE IP Architects group (the artists formerly known as the Exchange, SQL Server, and Windows Centers...

Paul ’s latest survey is a deep dive into the physical layout of your databases. It’s the same basic question, for four different size categories of database: what’s the physical layout of your database, and why? Paul will publish the results on 24 April, so please respond before then! -wp ...

I meant to.  I really did. But I got sick last week , and my energy level has been slow enough to come back that my focus was entirely elsewhere until about six last night. I panicked.  I gave fleeting consideration to throwing something hasty together, but everything I came up with struck...

One of the most popular posts in the history of this little corner of the Internets is one from August, 2005, which describes a method for accessing stored procedure output in a SELECT statement which I’ve come to refer to as “ the OPENROWSET trick .” On the occasion of this blog’s 750th post(!),...

I’m a little late to the party here, but this is pretty apropos of some of our discussions here lately. Brent Ozar is hosting a Disaster Recovery Horror Stories webcast this morning at 11a ET/8a PT.  You can read the full details here . I don’t think I’ll be able to attend, but it looks like an...

And I remember what she said to me How she swore that it never would end I remember how she held me, oh so tight Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then Bob Seger, Against the Wind All you need is love Love is all you need John Lennon and Paul McCartney, All You Need is Love My pal Jimmy May apparently...

Paul’s name should be familiar to denizens of the SQL Server blogosphere. Along with his wife, Kimberley Tripp , he’s a principal of SQL Skills (home also to the redoubtable Bob Beauchemin , with whom I share a birth date of significance to SQL Server aficionados); given that his history includes authorship...

Jens Suessmeyer is a Microsoft Consultant in Germany who frequently shares his useful techniques and insights both inside Microsoft and in the community at large.  In his latest post , he answers a colleague’s question with a simple yet thorough repro which proves the titular point. Here’s the money...

Never let it be said that Adam Machanic lacks style.. Adam left a comment on yesterday’s revisiting of the XML String Concatenation Trick, announcing his T-SQL Challenge: Grouped String Concatenation contest. Read Adam’s post to get all of the particulars for the event.  I hope to be able to play...

..but, once again, the dark underbelly of human nature has shown itself in my trackback pool.. Back in March of 2008, I went off on a little two - post rant about for-fee aggregators.  At the time, I said: For awhile now, I've been aware that there are several sites out there which are reposting...

Word today from Christopher Kilborn over at Port 80 that, as part of a larger initiative, Microsoft is relocating much of its Knowledge Base library. The money quote: Microsoft is moving its Developer & IT Professional primary support content (also known as Knowledge Base – or KB - articles...

I had a couple of extra minutes today and found this post on Linchi Shea’s blog ; I wanted to commend to all of you who’ve taken in the programming methodology and set-based thinking discussions in this little corner. While I disagree some with the point in the main post about views (JOINing views...

This is another one of those tricks that’s been available since the earth was cooling, but I just discovered it recently. So, here’s a history lesson in the form of a small T-SQL script, with the moral contained in the title of this post: set nocount on use master select object_id ( 'sysobjects...