July 2009

Being The Best vs. Being Affordable

I read a post on Brent Ozar’s blog last week that discussed employers’ expectations when hiring new team members.  Though the story was specific to database professionals, the same principles apply to almost any hiring situation.  The moral of Brent’s story is that when hiring, just like in real life, you have to compromise what you may really want to stay within…


Transaction Rollbacks with Identity Columns

Have you ever noticed unexpected gaps in sequences in SQL Server identity columns? Even though you’ve got transactions set up for your inserts and a no-deletion policy, you find that there are missing values in what should be an unbroken sequence of numbers.  The problem could be partially related to transaction rollbacks. Conventional wisdom would lead one to believe that…