Category: Uncategorized

There has been quite a debate going on at SQLServerCentral about a DBA journeyman certification. There are a couple good writeups (part 1 and part 2), from Jason Brimhall on the cert, and I’m happy to note that SQLServerCentral, and Red Gate software, are happy to sponsor these efforts. I’ve arranged for a Sharepoint site that has working documents as a group of volunteers are trying to come up with a way to actually test and certify individuals beyond that of an MCITP, but below an MCM.

It’s a neat idea, and I’m happy to be sponsoring it, as well as participating a bit in the discussion. Jeremiah Peschka from PASS is also helping, adding his thoughts and presenting ideas from that organization.

If you’re interested in somehow standardizing and providing better certifications for SQL Server professionals, I’d urge you to consider volunteering and helping out.

Kathi Kellenburger, fellow MVP and friend, pinged me recently for an interview for the Professional Development Virtual Chapter. This is one of the groups at PASS that tries to focus on a specific area, as opposed to move chapter based user groups that are location based.

She interviewed me through email and the interview is live, and you can check it out. It’s short, but I give out some of my thoughts on building your career and focusing on professional development.

This is a test of the plug in “Paste From Visual Studio”. I had this code sitting in SSMS and I did a CTRL+C to copy it to the clipboard. Then I clicked the “from Visual Studio shortcut that’s in my LiveWriter (image below) and this appeared.

ALTER DATABASE db1 SET SINGLE_USER

ALTER DATABASE db1 SET MULTI_USER

SELECT TOP 2
*
FROM sys.database_files
WHERE data_space_id > 1

Hopefully this translates in syndication well. Here’s the way LiveWriter has this listed now:

I was getting tired of pre-formatting code in LiveWriter. I love that software, but a couple of the technical things are a PIA. So after messing with this for weeks, hand fixing code blocks, I did the smart thing and Google’d for a plug in.

I found this one, Insert Code for Windows Live Writer, which seems to work well. It installs another “insert” level item called Code

I can click that, paste in code, and it color codes it. Here’s a sample snippet of T-SQL.

--===== Simple sum/total for each year
 SELECT Year,
        SUM(Amount) AS Total
   FROM #SomeTable1
  GROUP BY Year
  ORDER BY Year
.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
	font-size: small;
	color: black;
	font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace;
	background-color: #ffffff;
	/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt 
{
	background-color: #f4f4f4;
	width: 100%;
	margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

I picked that up from Jeff Moden’s article cut and pasted it in here. Looks great to me. We’ll see how it holds up. The only downside so far is that it defaults to C# and I have to switch it to TSQL.