Voice of the DBA

  • A Worse Computer; A Better Car

    A few weeks ago, my wife and I purchased a Lucid Gravity for our second EV. We’ve owned a Tesla for almost five years, and it has been an amazing car. However, we decided that we spend a lot of time driving, and we wanted something a little more luxurious. The Tesla has a bit of a stiff ride, and it’s not quite as lush a car as some others EVs that have come out since we…


  • The Fringe Festival

    I was lucky enough to take a vacation a decade ago in Edinburgh with my wife. She came over to the UK with me for a quick trip. We had never been to Scotland together, so we trained up and stayed in Stirling. We walked around the area, visited the Wallace Monument and toured Edinburgh.  We hiked up Arthur’s Seat and piled stones on a sunny August afternoon. We hadn’t planned it, but the Edinburgh Fringe Festival…


  • Building Great Software

    Most of us will work on software for our organization, and we might not want to or care about the end result being great. We do want it to work, and we want clients to find it useful. If we have external customers using our systems, maybe we want it to be great. In most of my experience, people are often proud of their work, sometimes ashamed, but not many people spend a lot of time making…


  • Why Use TRY_PARSE(): #SQLNewBlogger

    Someone asked why I would use TRY_PARSE after I posted a question at SQL Server Central: Getting the Average. Isn’t is slower? A fair question. This quick post looks at why. Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers. A Quick Setup The question above has the setup code, but what if I add another row? For example, I’ll run this . insert dbo.commission(   …


  • T-SQL Tuesday #201: Temp Tables

    This month we have a new host, which I am grateful for. So many people have stopped blogging that it’s a challenge to keep this going. Jeff Taylor has an invite asking us about a core T-SQL topic that can affect the performance of your app and your server: temp tables. This is an interesting one for me, as I’ve changed my mind on these over the years, especially as Microsoft has made improvements to the SQL…


VS Live San Diego

Currently Reading

Reshuffle
My current business book recommended by our CEO

administration AI Azure Backup/Recovery career career2 car update Cloud Computing coping database design databases Database Weekly DevOps disaster recovery encryption Friday Poll goals hardware Humor life Microsoft misc PASS powershell Redgate republish sabbatical security software development software development speaking SQL in the City SQLNewBlogger SQL Prompt SQL Saturday sql server syndicated T-SQL T-SQL Tuesday Tesla travel vacation windows words work