Archive for June, 2012

Goals – The end of one year, start of another

Just about a year ago, I talked about the importance of setting goals for yourself, both personally and professionally, making sure they’re lofty enough to challenge you, and making them public in order to hold yourself accountable.  It’s hard to believe a year has passed already, but here we are, and it’s time to see [...]

June 25, 2012  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Professional Development  10 Comments

Slacking Off: The Right Side of the Brain

I think it’s only fitting to follow up a post about performance reviews and self-evaluations with a post about slacking off, don’t you?  All work and no play makes Colleen a very grumpy DBA, and no one wants that.  So today I’m sharing with you some ways to stretch the right side of your brain.  [...]

June 15, 2012  Tags:   Posted in: Non-SQL Stuff  No Comments

Performance reviews – Self-evaluations

My annual performance review at work is coming up shortly, and this year they’ve decided to do things a bit differently.  For the first time in my career, I’ve been asked to perform a self-evaluation.  There’s no form to fill out.  Overall, it’s very unstructured; we’re simply being asked to list out our strengths, weaknesses, [...]

June 11, 2012  Tags:   Posted in: Professional Development  4 Comments

PAGE_VERIFY – Checksum vs. Torn Page Detection

All this talk of testing backups and data integrity and checksums has me thinking that maybe now would be a good time to discuss page verification options in SQL Server.  Sometimes bad things happen to good SANs and data pages aren’t quite the same when we read them as when we wrote them to disk.  [...]

June 7, 2012  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Internals  2 Comments

SQLSaturday #164 Cleveland – Tick tock, people!

If you haven’t already heard, Cleveland is hosting SQLSaturday #164 on August 18.  That date is coming up fast and right now we need you (yes you!).  The call for speakers is open for 2 more weeks, so if you’re interested in presenting, submit an abstract. Cleveland’s last SQLSaturday was a huge success.  Top speakers [...]

June 6, 2012  Tags:   Posted in: Professional Development  4 Comments