It’s three days to the first SQL Saturday in Nevada, taking place this Saturday in Las Vegas. I’m looking forward to going, meeting new people, and seeing lots of friends. The speaker lineup is amazing and you can see them all for FREE.
Just register and make your way to Las Vegas this Saturday. Looking forward to seeing some of you this weekend.
We’re in for a name change. As of May 1, we’ll be welcoming the Oracle and MySQL communities to SQLServerCentral. Our daily content will grow to include articles and questions about these platforms as we look to become more inclusive to the large numbers of data professionals that work on other platforms.
At Red Gate Software, my employer and owner of SQLServerCentral, we’ve built a number of tools for other platforms. We have our Compare product working on Oracle and MySQL, and we are actively working to extend this technology to MongoDB and other platforms. With so many professionals wearing multiple hats at their employers, we’ve decided to also consolidate our community sites.
As a result, we are going to change the name of the site to
That’s the new site and don’t worry, all your old URLs will redirect. We’ve been working hard to ensure that everything still works as planned, and we have some new tags coming that will allow you to easily filter information to the specific platform you need.
We think this is a great move forward, to include other platforms and give you the opportunity to learn more about other technologies, even if your company doesn’t use them. This is also an April Fool joke, so if you’ve read this far, hopefully you’re smiling with relief.
I do like Oracle and MySQL as technologies and they work fine. I just think in many cases SQL Server works better and I like using it. That being said, the site isn’t changing, but I would encourage you to learn more about other platforms if you have an interest, or your company uses them. Having additional skills can help your career, even if it’s a safety net.
My first commercial!
This comes from our DBA Team promotion, which is ongoing this year.
Recently I heard a few people that note that they were really hoping the next update for Windows 8 will bring back the “Run button”, which was available in XP and Windows 7. I guess it was in Vista, but we won’t talk about that fiasco.
I asked a question to the Intertubes and someone told me to do this:
It’s that simple, and I tested it in Windows 8. It works well. Here’s what it looks like:
Hit Windows+R, that’s the Windows key and the R button together. That gives you this:
The Run dialog appears in the lower left hand corner. For me, that’s just above the IE icon (this is Windows 8, not 8.1, no Start menu button) and the last thing I ran is in there. I removed my item, but you will see what you last ran.
Now, if you look in your taskbar, on the right side, you’ll see an icon that is the run dialog. In the image below, I’ve drawn an arrow pointing to it.
If you right click this icon, you’ll get a menu.
If you click “Pin”, then this icon will remain in the taskbar. You can click it anytime to get the Run dialog.
Voice of the DBA 