This weekend I am in Wagga Wagga, which is a rural town five hours inland from Sydney, for the annual SQL Down under Code Camp. In order to get to Wagga Wagga there are two options, either fly or drive from one of the larger cities. The flight is on a...

Following on from the editorial earlier in the week about productivity, why is it that when I am not performing work-related activities that I find I achieve so much more? Is it that I am really doing more or is it that activities outside of Information...

Although SQL Server 2008 has been barely even released for two months, Microsoft are already starting to talk about future releases of the product. The Business Intelligence conference kicked off in Seattle on Oct. 6, which was coincidentally 2 months...

A question I am sure a lot of you ask is where has all of my time gone? I know that there are times when I will ask myself that same question. One of the things that I have learnt over time is the art of delegation and the importance of identifying efficiency...

I have been looking at my calendar today planning for the next few weeks. At the moment, the next week is looking just a little crazy, as I have everything from an assignment due to two breakfast seminars on opposite sides of Australia. In between this...

" Ebony and Ivory " was a hit single written by Paul McCartney and performed with Stevie Wonder in the early 1980s. It is an interesting song as it is essentially about two things that are poles apart. I was working with a colleague today who...

Many people are expecting that much of the focus at PDC this year will be around cloud computing and Software plus Services. I am sure that there will be a number of new announcements that follow-on from the announcements at recent Tech-Ed events about...

In the hundreds of different organisations that I have been involved with since Data Dude was first released there are only a handful that are using Visual Studio Team System VSTS Database Edition (aka Data Dude). One of the main problems that is stopping...

At the moment the world has been plunged into what a lot of financial analysts are calling the "global share market bloodbath." Overnight the Dow Jones lost 778 points, which is its largest point decline in history. Many people are directly...

When my wife and I travel we are big fans of going on a road trip. I think one of the things we enjoy is the adventure, as you are never quite sure what you will find along the way. It could be coming across a spectacular lookout just as the sun is setting...

James Luetkehoelter recently wrote an interesting blog post that was an open letter to vendors pleading them not to use the SQL Server sa account. I agree with James's sentiments that there is no reason for an application to use the sa account. However...

It is getting towards that time of the year when I normally start to think about buying a new laptop. This year I am thinking of doing something a little different. Rather than buying one laptop, I am seriously contemplating buying two. Dell has recently...

As SQL Server 2008 has now been released for eight weeks, the first Cumulative Update (CU) has appeared. Cumulative Update 1 contains the hotfixes for issues that have been fixed since the release of SQL Server 2008. The details for downloading this CU...

Documentation is an important component in the governance of any project; however, I sometimes feel that more time is spent on documentation than the project itself. Large projects are full of all sorts of documents ranging from terms of reference and...

I was reading an article today about a company that is providing a gigabyte of storage in the cloud for $0.15 per month. This equates to about $180 per year for 100GB of storage. This sounds cheap but when you compare this cost to a Seagate Barracuda...