The day started off with the Quest Software breakfast presentation, to which I arrived late to find a standing-room-only crowd. I left early to find a spot to sit – after yesterday’s interesting but much too long opening ceremony, I elected to catch up on blogging and attend the keynote virtually via Twitter. I attended Andy Leonard’s session entitled “Applied…
Day two of the summit found me in the keynote, an interesting but much too long (2 hours) for comfort. Among the most notable information was the confirmation that SQL Server 2008 R2 will definitely be released during the first half of next year, along with a couple of new SKUs for the product. Also part of the presentation was…
Day one for me began with a leisurely breakfast at Top Pot donuts with Jack Corbett, Andy Warren, and Don Gabor. We were joined briefly by Robert Cain, and Greg Larsen. We talked PASS, career development, networking, and various other interesting (perhaps even a few uninteresting) topics. Don’s perspective as a nontechnical person was refreshing, and since we’ve spent a…
For me, today was the start of a six-day SQL Server adventure at the PASS Summit in Seattle. The day started off not so well, with my 2 year old finding – and losing – the digi cam’s memory card, which is apparently obsolete and can’t be replace. Off to an unscheduled trip to Best Buy for a new camera. …
I have a sad story to tell you. Sit down and grab a tissue. It was 10pm on a cool night in September 2005. Somewhere in Grapevine, Texas, a junior SQL Server professional was sitting alone in a hotel room watching TV. He was tired but not exhausted, having spent all day learning his trade at the Super Bowl of…
In the first installment of this discussion, I talked about the challenges facing database professionals and others with respect to healthcare data integration. In this post I’ll talk about the first part of the problem: a lack of adoption of the required technologies and/or methodologies. I’ll also describe when an electronic health record really isn’t. We’ve all seen it; it…
Anyone who has kept up with PASS-related news during the past couple of weeks is keenly aware of the fallout surrounding this year’s Board of Directors election. I’ve been associated with PASS for a number of years now (though admittedly I wasn’t as connected or involved as I am now), but I can’t recall there ever having been a BOD election…
Last week, I had lunch with an old friend who is, by his own definition, technologically ignorant. While we caught up, he asked me to explain in terms he could understand what I do for a living. I went through one of my spiels (the one usually reserved for relatives who only know that I work “with computers”), delivering a…
If you are a blogger and you post product reviews on your blog, you may have to answer to the FTC starting in December. An article in the New York Times earlier this week outlines a new Federal Trade Commission regulation currently under review which, if approved, would tighten the rules of disclosure that must be followed by those who…
So you’ve got some packages that regularly extract data to one or more text files, but you know that from time to time some of the queries will not return any data. However, you find in SSIS that, in a flat file export package, the output file is created regardless of whether any rows are written to the file, and…