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How do -you- install SQL Server? (Part 2)

Welcome to this series on a thought process around SQL Server Installation. In Part 1, we started talking about some basic steps and a thought process for a repeatable success story with your SQL Server installations. Today let’s continue that story and talk some more about installation planning and success. We’ll finish up talking about [...]

How do -you- install SQL Server (Part 1)

No, this is not an installation guide
There is documentation for that found in many places. First good place to look is Books Online (2005/2008) but there are plenty of other community resources found at sites like SQL Server Central and SQLServerPedia as well as blogs.
What I mean by this post is to ask, “How do [...]

Work Now or Work (And Pay) Later

Work costs something whenever you do it…
This weekend we had some nice weather on Sunday. In between church activities and family time, I took advantage of the weather to get some work done on our vegetable garden. We chose to try a “no dig” raised bed vegetable garden. Basically you pile various materials (grass clippings, [...]

Free SQL Training Online – Wednesday 10/21/09

Where?
Quest Connect is an online series of webcasts on various topics. Some are pre-recorded (like the session that I did.. more on that later…). They have web casts on a variety of topics, not just SQL. You can look at the on demand topic listing here to see all the chats that will be available [...]

You Could Be Suffering Right Now

Implicit Conversions In SQL Server – A Silent Perf Killer
I recently had the opportunity to work with a developer at the day job. He was using a loop (for what he was doing it actually makes sense ) and he had a query that ran great when he stripped the query out of [...]

A Picture That Says, “Don’t Shrink!” (and other things…)

So I wrote a lot of posts around shrinking (Here, here, here). Some of my posts were turned into a wiki article on SQLServerPedia. I thought I was done posting about this but one more.
I talked about why we shouldn’t do it on a regular basis. Why it should really be reserved for use in [...]

Documentation

Documentation
(…Or how I learned to stop procrastinating and love tolerate a chore necessary task)
Do you document? Do you document well?
As I told Paul Randal (twitter, blog) today on twitter, this blog post was inspired by an observation in the shower and a recent question by Brent Ozar (twitter, blog). You didn’t need to know that [...]