In many organizations, there’s a push to save cost. “Cost” is an integral part of a profit-and-loss statement in the organization. Even if you work in a non-profit organization, cost control is central. Of course, you can take cost-control too far. You could, for instance, remove the shipping costs from your company, but if you ...

Let's face it, there is a wide variety of skill out there. If you spend any time monitoring StackOverflow, MSDN forums, Ask SQL Server Central or twitter's #sqlhelp hash tag, you'll be very well aware that there are people out there barely managing their database environments - people that some of us wouldn't let within a mile of our own data ...

I was tagged by Tim Mitchell (twitter) in a recent meme launched by Paul Randal (twitter), entitled, ''What three events brought you here?'' Well, I've lied told stories about this in the past.  If you've read my previous posts about my career (in particular, this one), you'll know that I'm Canadian, gave up NHL dreams early, ...

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 ...