2012: New Year, New Goals

Happy New Year to all! At the start of 2011, I laid out some goals for the year and did an update on them back in July. Now that it’s 2012 it’s a great time to take a look at what I accomplished (and fell short on) last year and also set some new targets. [...]

A Tale of Training

As a follow-up to my previous post about the steps you may have to go through to attend training if your employer can’t or won’t offer assistance in the form of either money or time off, I have a story of my own to tell. I was unhappy at my previous place of work [...]

Thoughts on #SQLFamily

This is the second time I’ve participated in the “Meme Monday” blog events that have been brought to us by Tom LaRock (blog | @SQLRockstar). The topic is on what “SQL Family” means to us. A few things popped into my head as soon as I read it, and I’m happy to share [...]

Discussing Pay in the Workplace

So I quit my job last week. As is the practice at most companies, I had to complete an exit interview. Since my former employer was rather geographically distributed and there were no human resources staff in my office, my exit interview was on paper instead of face-to-face. I liked this much [...]

Data Domains & Security

After working with data day-in and day-out for a while, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that thinking about the domain and appropriate datatype for storing a set of data would become second-nature. I know it’s that way for me. Sadly, I can’t say the same for one of the banks I do business with, [...]