Redundancy and College Marching Band

Every once in a while I hope to use this blog to investigate the lighter side of database/computing topics.  After all, redundancy can (and should!) exist in many more places than corporate network architectures.  One of the places you may be surprised to hear about redundancy is college marching bands, which I feel more than [...]

Seven Free Applications You Should Try

I think all of us who sit in front of a computer for a living have a few free programs that we’re particularly fond of.  Here’s what I’m liking as of late.

Notepad++

My favorite general-purpose text editor.  Along with pretty much anything else, I find myself writing a lot of T-SQL code in here and then [...]

Book Review: Microsoft Official Academic Course 70-443 / 70-450

When preparing to take certification exams, I always purchase test preparation materials no matter how ready I feel that I am.  I do this for two reasons:

There’s no such thing as being too prepared (being a Boy Scout taught me this many times over)
I can be sure of what topics will be covered

As I was [...]

The Chicken

A little over a week ago, Wendy Pastrick (blog | twitter) had a blog post, Attack of the Killer Maintenance Plan, where she crafts a horror story from her experience checking out some maintenance plans designed by a former employee.

After reading this, I was inspired to come up with my own tale, blended with classic [...]

Five Things SQL Server Needs To Drop

While I wasn’t explicitly tagged for participation in this meme, Wendy Pastrick (blog | twitter) was kind enough to tag everyone else who hasn’t been tagged already.  Being in need of a first topic for a blog post, this seemed like a good one to start with!

Since a lot of things have already been spoken [...]