I just passed 100,000 views on the blog. That's from 400 posts over a period of time starting in March of 2008. You guys have posted 1129 comments. The average views per week went from 39 in 2008 to 160 in 2010. I realize others out there are hitting 100,000 a week, but for some of us small time bloggers, this is a big deal. I just wanted to say thanks for stopping by and I hope my attempts at understanding SQL Server, PowerShell, SCOM, spatial data, Visual Studio, ORM and whatever else I've posted about has been helpful in some way.
One of the best things to come out with Powershell V2 is remoting and asynchronous calls. Between the two of these, you can basically send commands simultaneously to a number of SQL Server instances. BUT... and there always seems to be one of those, there is a lot of work required to get this running right. I'm going to outline what I did recently to test the ability of PowerShell to begin administering my servers remotely. Hopefully this provide the basis for a checklist and a how-to. I'll update this post over time so that I get things right. Enable remoting on the machines you wish to call This requires admin privileges, but it's pretty simple unless you need to modify which ports are available, etc. But to get it going the easiest…
The results of a survey conducted by the PASS organization have been posted (thanks to the Board for all their work, again). Since getting to speak at PASS is a competition, I really shouldn't be pointing this out, because I'd like to speak again. However, if you're trying to decide whether or not a detailed discussion of Windows Server 2008 Collation would be more interesting to the attendees than a session on Filtered Indexes (it wouldn't) you can go check it out on the survey. It should help you make better choices for what the attendees want to see. Of course, if everyone runs off and submits sessions on the same four or five topics, that's going to open up others. Regardless, this is a service to the attendees because…
We've been running the Enterprise Policy Management tools available from Codeplex for a few months now (Thanks to Buck Woody's (blog | twitter) session at the PASS Summit). They're honestly great. It's a fantastic way to use Policy Based Management on 2000 and 2005 servers. We did hit some issues with timeouts and looking at the script, it made a call to invoke-sqlcmd, but didn't pass the -querytimeout value. That means it default to 30 seconds and the import to database process was taking more than a minute for some of our queries. I did a little looking around and decided to just disable the timeout by passing a value of zero (0). But, I still got timeouts. Finally, after a bit of searching around, I found a closed (because…
There has been some discussion recently around the location of the PASS Summit. The debate was centered on the results from a recent survey hosted by PASS. Today's Community Connector has an editorial by the PASS President, Rushabh Mehta, explaining why those of us on the East Coast will be flying to the other side of the continent for the next two years, and supplying the results of the survey I get why they're doing this. Microsoft really will commit more resources to an event that is in their back yard. I get it. I also understand, that those of us who consider the PASS Summit a big part of our "community" are actually in the minority. Most people attending the Summit aren't involved in the community, aren't interested in…
Two years old. In March of 2008 I received a whopping 96 visits. I'm up to 1900 so far this month. I'd call that a positive growth trend. Thanks for stopping by, especially if you've been here more than once.
I needed to create an identical index on a bunch of tables within one of my projects (yes, I know this is problematic on multiple levels and I'm working on that too). Rather than sitting around typing this up, I decided to use PowerShell to do the work for me. I'm still very much learning how to do things in PowerShell so this took me almost as long as it would have to type them up, but now I know more than I did. Having gone through the pain of trying to find a good example on the web that did exactly what I wanted (they're out there, just hard to find), I decided I'd add this one in so the next person had at least one more source of…
The second annual New England Data Camp is shaping up to one excellent event. We've put together a great set of sponsors. Thanks to them we're providing much better food than last year and the chance at a bit of swag, again, better than last year. But, most importantly, we have an excellent selection of speakers. The schedule has been posted so you can go and check it out and start laying out which ones you can hit. Some of the people speaking are known internationally (Adam Machanic, Aaron Bertrand), some are local luminaries, some are up and coming, and several are probably on the fast track to being MVP's. In other words, this is the place to go to learn something about SQL Server in New England. It's not…
UPDATE: Lulu has removed, not just my stolen material, but all offending material. That means some of the links in this post will no longer work. Back to the post... And really bad plagiarism at that. I received an email from someone suggesting I check out a book on Lulu.com, that it might be a copy of my book. Sure enough, this other guy, William Miller, had posted my book, with the original cover (that had my name on it) and the original description on his own "author" page. He also offered a decent little discount on the price. Nice guy. I tried to get an image of his copy of my book, but I can't find anything on any of the internet archives, which is just as well. His work…
Wow, the bloggers table is empty today! Nice intro! Good photo's. I love the Summit! Bill Graziano is introducing Day 3. He acknowledged Twitter and the bloggers. We rock! Outgoing board members are Greg Low and Pat Wright. These are great guys who've busted their butts for the community. Kevin Kline is completely off the board now, finishing his time as the immediate past-president. I'm pretty sure that's the first time he won't be on the board. Yep, I'm right, he's never been off the board since PASS was a organization. He really has done a lot for the organization. Thanks for your time Kevin. A review of all the other board members including the new president Rushabh Mehta and Wayne Snyder as the immediate past president. April 21-23,2010 the…