I have two little boys at home, and my parents were both teachers. It gives me a strange relationship with our public schools – I am passionate about them, and the quality of education I want for my kids, but I have to keep my distance a little, lest they drive me completely around the bend. One reason it’s so frustrating: among all the complex ...

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday – a blog party dreamed up by sqlblog.com’s Adam Machanic ( blog | @AdamMachanic ) – is about that code we’ve all written that we don’t really like to think about too often. You know the stuff. I can’t help but imagine the next poor guy who comes across some of mine and thinks, “What the … How in … Seriously?” I have two ...

This is part II of two Scandalous posts. Watch, mouth agape, as I run with scissors, right up against prevailing wisdom! Unfollow me now, before it’s too late! Here’s the thing. There are two really outstanding posts out there on the ‘tubez that explain in vivid detail the problems with sending compressed data into a de-duplicating appliance. And ...

Awwlright, both of you, my dear readers. I should not be writing this post, but I have to get it off my chest. This is part I of two Scandalous posts. Unfollow me now, before it’s too late. I have been around so many people lately who are loving, fawning over, peddling, drooling over and otherwise talking up virtualization, that I have to remind ...

Today I am putting up something silly, just for fun. I set myself the task a while back to write a Sudoku solver in T-SQL, but with two dumb constraints that I would never follow given a real problem: I didn’t look at any documented techniques for solving Sudoku, and I specifically avoided T-SQL solutions, even though this has been done already ...

Mercy, I think I made it. Today was the post-con for the PASS Summit, and I was in a great session hosted by Louis Davidson and Paul Nielsen. I say ''hosted'' because it was really more a guided, interactive discussion than a lecture, which is great for PASS, and especially great for the end of PASS when everyone's eyes are a little glazed over. ...