I often think that Microsoft is a bit like the English language, a lot of people speak it, a lot of people don’t and for many people it’s a second or third language they need for work e.g. air traffic controllers. In technology few of us run a totally Microsoft environment, a few more will… Read more
Albert Einstein once remarked that you don’t need to remember everything, you just needed to remember where to look. When it comes to learning about Microsoft products this can sometimes be harder than it ought to be and what resources there are can be fragmented so you do have to remember where to look. That’s… Read more
I spent last Thursday at Black Marble’s Architect Forum and my slot was on SQL, NoSQL, some SQL. It went down very well but I used OneNote on my tablet not PowerPoint and like all modern art my drawing needs a bit of explaining.. Databases were originally used to store transactions which are highly structured, … Read more
I have to confess I hadn’t paid too much attention to the changes to T-SQL in SQL Server 2012, and it was only a question at NextGenUG in Abingdon last night that prompted me to have a look. It turns out there are some really useful new commands, which I could certainly have done with… Read more
I am in the middle of SQL relay this week, but I just realised that you might like to have a copy of my Denali slide deck, which I have now posted to SkyDrive. You are welcome to have a look at it even if you couldn’t make one of the four venues I am… Read more
SQL Bits 9, Adelphi Hotel Liverpool 29th September to 1 October 2011, what else do you need to know? Well possibly a few things if you are now reading the second line of this post or you haven’t been to them before.. It’s the biggest and best SQL event in Europe, I know this because… Read more
One of the few niggles I have about working at Microsoft is the way we try and put you the reader into pigeon holes, and an area where this fails for me is when it comes to SQL Server. My developer friends won’t go near SQL Server unless they have to and this things like … Read more
I caught a really good presentation from Chris Kranz(www.wafl.co.uk and @ckranz), Principal Solutions Architect responsible for Storage and Virtualisation projects at leading Systems Integrator, Kelway (UK) Ltd. at the Leeds VM user group last month. Chris first encountered virtualisation technologies back in 2005 with early releases of VMware ESX and has since gained the highest… Read more
While Excel is definitely the most widely used BI end user tool, SQL skills are often needed to get data from a source and into Excel be that Excel stand alone or with an add-on like PowerPivot. There are many big differences between Excel expressions and SQL but it’s the little ones that floor us… Read more
In order to understand why you might want use the new Reporting Services in SQL Azure you need to understand where it fits and in order to do that you need to know a little bit about how reporting services works, and even what it is if you’re new SQL Server but have perhaps heard… Read more