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PASS Call for Nominations is Open

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ June 24, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

The call for nominations for the PASS Board of Directors has been announced. The past three years I have been involved in the process as a candidate. This time, I am proud to tell everyone that I was asked to serve on the nominations committee. In other words, for years I was eating the bacon, [...]

Updated Rankings

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ June 20, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

Well, as it turns out, waiting six weeks since the last update was the perfect amount of time. We had a handful of people get shuffled around this time, one person was dropped, and four new bloggers are listed. Will it be you? Are you one of the bloggers that I have set my sights [...]

SQL University – HA/DR Week

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ June 9, 2010 ⋅ 2 comments

I may be at TechEd this week, but that doesn’t excuse me from pitching in for SQL University. This week we are going to discuss the most critical function you have as administrators: your ability to recover from a disaster. Make no mistake, this is going to decide if you are able to keep your [...]

See You On The Other Side

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ June 4, 2010 ⋅ 14 comments

Today is my last day with (I’ve never been allowed to publicly say where I work and it always rubbed me the wrong way). Nine years of my life. Thankfully none of them were wasted. During my time here I was given the opportunity to grow, both as a person and as a professional. There [...]

Another Miracle Trip

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ June 1, 2010 ⋅ 9 comments

This past weekend I took another trip up to Lake Placid. I wrote about my trip last year in a piece titled “Luck, Preparation, and Opportunity“, to this day one of my favorite blog posts I have written. With my upcoming job change the trip this year to Lake Placid seemed to be an opportune [...]

SQL University – Parallelism Week

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ May 26, 2010 ⋅ 9 comments

I may be in the middle of a career makeover, but that does not excuse me from missing out on SQL University. This week we are going to talk about parallelism, an aspect of SQL Server that many DBAs have only a cursory amount of information.
tempdb
The first thing you need to do is to understand [...]

The 24 HOP Strikes Back

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ May 17, 2010 ⋅ 2 comments

This Wednesday, May 19th, PASS will be hosting their second 24 Hours of PASS event. The first event last September was quite successful. So successful, in fact, that when PASS decided to do it again my first thought was about how difficult it is for sequels to be as successful as the original. For example, [...]

Statistical Sampling for Verifying Database Backups

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ May 14, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

There was a conversation a while back on Twitter regarding a survey that claimed to represent “Americans”. I don’t recall the survey itself, but I believed the end result used words such as “62% of Americans think bacon should replace turkey as a Thanksgiving meal.” The survey itself was conducted using 1,000 people, and someone [...]

Utility Control Point

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ May 13, 2010 ⋅ 12 comments

I’ll be honest, I was *really* looking forward to using the Utility Control Point feature in SQL 2008 R2. I wanted to give the UCP a test drive, kick the tires, and get out on the open road. I even started asking around to see if we could get our hands on the shiny new [...]

SQL University – SSIS Design and Development

By Thomas LaRock ⋅ May 12, 2010 ⋅ 2 comments

Welcome back to SQL University! This week I am going to step *way* outside my comfort zone and talk about SSIS. I am not embarrassed to say that I have little to no practical experience as an SSIS developer, I simply have not had the need to play with SSIS to the extent that I [...]