Ok, I have to admit the painful truth. I'm reliably slow to the finish line. This year, I got my slides into PASS HQ by the skin of my teeth, the weekend before the event was to begin.  Although I could say with a straight face ''I uploaded my slides!''.  I have to be honest that I wasn't surprised when many of my attendees said that ...

In last month's column, ''2012 Might Really Be the End of the World as We Know It,'' I described a number of major developments in the IT industry that are likely to disrupt the life of database professionals everywhere.  I categorize those four disruptors - virtualization, cloud computing, solid state drives (SSD), and advanced ...

I had a very interesting conversation recently with a good friend of mine.  She's at the top of her game as a first class enterprise DBA in a major medical institution.  She was interested in my career advice because she'd recently received an unsolicited invitation for a higher paying job in the business intelligence (BI) ...

Many thanks to Microsoft SQL Server MVP Andy Leonard (blog | twitter) for conducting a series of interviews of prominent SQL Server types, including me.  The interview found here. ~~~ Enjoy! -Kev Twitter at kekline More content at http://KevinEKline.com

SSWUG.ORG’s virtual webcasts will prepare the “Accidental DBA” for patterns and practices they will experience in their role as a database administrator. I will provide easy-to-understand insights and realistic examples for professionals who have not had any formal DBA training. By the end of our four-part series, you should have the ...

Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) and I did an interview with TechTarget’s Brendan Cournoyer at last summer's Tech-Ed, which as turned into a podcast titled “Cloud efforts advance, SQL Server evolves.” The podcast covers all the major trends at the conference (like BI), virtualization features in Quest’s products (like Spotlight), Brent’s new book ...

Sometimes I'm timely in getting the news out on useful resources.  And, other times, I'm a bit slower on the draw.  As I told my friends back at New Year's Day, ''As an official member of the Procrastinators Club, welcome to 2008!''  On the other hand, it's always good to remind folks of great resources that are still ...

I did a lot of writing in 2010. Unfortunately, I didn't do a good job of keeping all of that writing equally distributed throughout all of the channels where I'm active. So here are a few more posts from my blog, put on-line during the months of November and December 2010, that I didn't get posted here on SQLBlog.com: 1. It's Time to ...

Don’t be afraid of that title – I’m not talking about Six Sigma or anything super-formal here. In many organizations, there are more folks in other IT roles than in the Data Professional area. In other words, there are more developers, system administrators and so on than there are the “DBA” role. That means we often have more to do than the ...

As the Data Professional in your organization, the rest of the org looks to you to ensure that the system can handle what the business requires. To do that, you need to know two things: what the business requires, and what SQL Server can do. But of course there’s a bit more to it than that. Knowing the business side of the requirements – well, I ...