Last week Microsoft announced several new offerings for “Big Data” - and since I’m a stickler for definitions, I wanted to make sure I understood what that really means. What is “Big Data”? What size hard drive is that? After all, my laptop has 1TB of storage - is my laptop “Big Data”? There are actually a few definitions for this term, most ...

Quick post - I got news that I will be speaking at the PASS Summit 2011. What a huge honor. As I understand it, I am the first Venezuelan ever to speak at PASS. I'm super excited! The Lightning Talk is called ''Quick Tips to Enhance tempdb Performance'', and I have to practice this talk a lot. I'll have exactly 5 minutes to deliver it, and ...

Assuming all goes as planned, I will be in Columbus, OH this Friday night and Saturday for SQL Saturday 75. I really love SQL Saturday events the best of all of the events because they are very intimate in nature. As a fairly antisocial person, I sometimes get overwhelmed by the size of other events, even the SQL Rally was just barely in my ...

Introduction I was honored to sit at the blogger's table during the keynote sessions at the PASS Summit 2010! Our official job was to promote the Summit keynotes via social media and our blogs. Our unofficial job was to pick on each other. Rob's response? ''Realised is spelled with an 's', not a 'z'.'' Goals Are Good In the kickoff session ...

The keynote starts off with a tine Turner impersonator (or maybe it really was Tina?):   Rushabh Mehta (donning the Tina wig) delivers the first segment of the keynote, telling the SQL Server community that we are ''simply the best.'' He then introduces the Board of Directors and founding partners.  He tells us the Board of Directors ...

If you’re still unsure if the workshop I’ll deliver at PASS Summit the next November - “Creating a BI solution from A to Z” - is a good choice for you or not, you can get some more details reading the brief interview here: PASS Summit Post-Con Preview - Davide Mauri Where you’ll find answers to the following questions: Is there an audience ...

I’m sitting in the Seattle airport, waiting for my flight to Silicon Valley California for the SQL Server 2008 R2 Launch Event. By some quirk of nature, they are asking me to Emcee the event – but that’s another post entirely.   I’m reflecting on the SQL Saturday 27 event that was just held in Portland, Oregon this last Saturday. These ...

PASS Europe 2010 is finished and I’m now finally back at home and will stay here for a while. I would like to thanks all the people who has come to my sessions for all their feedback, especially for the “Adaptive BI” session! Slides and demos should be available for download from the PASS European Conference website in a couple of ...

If you’re holding a special event, such as a SQL Saturday or a user group, one of the challenges is to get speakers for the event. Now, the best speakers come from the community – people who use the product day-in, day-out. They have a wealth of expertise, and many of them are really great presenters. But from time to time you might want to get a ...

For any of you who attended the Quest breakfast at PASS (and anyone else really) I wanted to go ahead and post the code and give a little wrap up/explanation. (I will post the stuff on perf counters later. They are cool, but this is really what I wanted to make sure people saw.) I had a plan for my presentation, but time was less than I expected, ...