After 3 days of trying to take a picture for Christmas cards...

After 3 days of trying to take a picture for Christmas cards this is what we decided upon. It is good we have digital cameras otherwise we would have developed 10 rolls of film.



we were going to do this one originally but decided to give it another shot and I think it turned out well

I like big blogs and I cannot lie.......

Okay so I created a blogpost titled The Ten Most Asked SQL Server Questions And Their Answers

After you are active in the newsgroups for a while you will notice that the same questions are asked over and over again. I had this idea to create a post like that for a while and I finally finished :-)

Here is what is in that post

1) Selecting all the values from a table for a particular date
2) Search all columns in all the tables in a database for a specific value
3) Splitting string values
4) Select all rows from one table that don't exist in another table
5) Getting all rows from one table and only the latest from the child table
6) Getting all characters until a specific character
7) Return all rows with NULL values in a column
8) Row values to column (PIVOT)
9) Pad or remove leading zeroes from numbers
10) Concatenate Values From Multiple Rows Into One Column

So check it out here: The Ten Most Asked SQL Server Questions And Their Answers

And I will leave you with the theme music of this post's title :-)

All the interviews I did with the SQL legends

Yesterday in the Christmas Came Early This Year post I linked to an interview I did with Itzik Ben-Gan, today I decided to link to all the interviews I did

The first interview I did was with the late Ken Henderson, I owe so much to Ken and his Guru's Guide to SQL books, they made me a much better developer. I was a technical reviewer for the 2nd edition of his Guru guide to SQL book and I just hope that it will be published some time...
An Interview With Ken Henderson About The Forthcoming Book SQL Server 2005 Practical Troubleshooting: The Database Engine

Say all you want about Celko and his behaviour in the newsgroups, he does write some pretty good books
Interview With Joe Celko About The Forthcoming Book Thinking In Sets

Probably one of my favorite interviews
Interview With SQL Server MVP Louis Davidson: Author Of Pro SQL Server 2005 Database Design and Optimization

Inside SQL Server is a book every SQL Developer should have, it was an honor to interview SQL Goddess Kalen
Interview With Kalen Delaney About Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Query Tuning and Optimization

Adam's book is filled with really good advice, I keep coming back to this book all the time
Interview with Adam Machanic Author Of Expert SQL Server 2005 Development

If T-SQL is your thing then there is no one better that Itzik, his books will open your eyes to the world of T-SQL
Interview With Itzik Ben-Gan Author Of Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005: T-SQL Querying

A nice interview about refactoring SQL applications
Interview With Stéphane Faroult About Refactoring SQL Applications

I am a fan of Scott's column in Dr Dobbs and was very excited he wanted to do an interview
Database Refactoring Interview With Scott W. Ambler

Who doesn't know Erland? His curse and blessing of dynamic SQL is a must read
Interview With Erland Sommarskog About SQL Server and Transact SQL

Jamie is a real SSIS guru and I was glad he wanted to do this interview
Interview With SSIS Guru Jamie Thomson

My second interview with Louis
Interview With Louis Davidson Author of Pro SQL Server 2008 Relational Database Design and Implementation

Christmas Came Early This Year

This just arrived in the mail.


A big thanks to Itzik Ben-Gan. I will put up a review in a week or so.
Now I have a big problem, should I watch the season finale of Californication or should I start beginning to read Microsoft® SQL Server 2008 T-SQL Fundamentals?

I will not tell you what I will do. I interviewed Itzik a while back about his SQL Server 2005 book, you can read that interview here: Interview With Itzik Ben-Gan Author Of Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005: T-SQL Querying

How long did it take for the market to recover after 1929?

Someone left me a comment on the So You Think The Market Is Bad Now? It Went Down 89% Between 1929 And 1932 post asking for some additional data for the chart. Here is some of that data, as you can see it took 25 years to close above 400 again. Just imagine if this happens now, a lot of people will not be able to retire, the only problem is that there is not an abundance of jobs either, as a matter of fact there is a shortage.




Click on the chart for a larger version

Real Men Do NOT Use Fancy Bottle Openers

I have some family members who love to drink some good wine, some of them have these fancy openers. Take a look at this thing below

What the hell is that, you need a 10 page manual to understand what to pull or push with that thing. That opener looks like it will make Champagne out of white wine if you use it


Here is the only thing you need to open a bottle of wine

That opener did not cost me a single penny, I got it for free in 1993 and I am still using it. Before I worked in IT I was working in the restaurant business, my father had some restaurants and I just went along. I came to the United States in 1993 and worked for a couple of years as a waiter before getting into IT.
Back to the opener; you don't need these fancy openers at all, I have opened many bottles of wine with my simple opener. Here is a partial list, these wines will look familiar to some of you who like to collect and or drink fine wines
Opus One
Grgich Hills
Sassicaia
Ornellaia
Gaja Barbaresco
Gavi de gavi La Scolca black label
Tignanello (Villa Antinori)

Can you tell I worked in Italian restaurants? So where is the danger with opening wines? Take a bottle of Gaja Barbaresco for example, The cork is so long that you probably will break it into pieces if you are not careful. You need to screw the opener in as much as you can, pull out the cork a little, screw the opener all the way until it cannot go any deeper and then you need to carefully pull out the cork little by little. Some companies are switching to rubber corks and screwtops these days because there is less danger of the wine being spoiled that way. So remeber next time you are tempted to buy that 'fancy' opener, save your money, buy the cheap one and use the remainder of the money to buy a nice bottle of wine.

A nice podcast about wines is Wine Library TV hosted by Gary Vaynerchuk

So remember, real men do not:

• Use fancy wine openers
• Blow dry their hair
• Use a Macintosh Computer(Oh yes, I will get some hate comments for that one)

I worked for about 3 years in New York City in the restaurant business, I have some crazy/funny stories, leave me a comment if you want me to write something about that. If I get a couple of comments asking for it I will write about it. For example I can tell you that Billy Joel takes his leftovers home.

Knowledge Transfer Lego Style

Knowledge Transfer Lego Style



Obviously I had some creepy ideas this morning to come up with this while playing with my kids