Last week was the 2013 edition of the SQL Server Days. It was an amazing event: there was a great audience, fantastic speakers and nice booths by the sponsors (especially the bar with Belgian beer was pretty awesome). It was great meeting up with the #sqlfamily again. Anyway, I gave a session about using BIML to generate SSIS packages based on metadata. The session went pretty well: demos didn't crash and the audience had some good questions (which I was luckily able to answer).

How important is database documentation to you? I know you have a hundred “more important” things to do. But consider this: how much time is it going to take you to document the purpose of a constraint right now? How much time will you spend trying to remember that purpose in seven months when a developer has a question about it? Documenting a database and its objects when they are created can save you hours of work in the long run.

Database mirroring is a fantastic feature. It allows for a high safety and performance-capable copy of a database in another physical location. This feature provides a level of failure tolerance on the database which flows to the disk level. Of course, there is a specific failure point still remaining, which Availability Groups provides – server-level failure tolerance. With the combination of mirroring technology and Windows Server Failover Clustering, a level of availability is reached far beyond what mirroring alone provided.

I admit that I am a bit of a spelling and grammar Nazi. It drives me to absolute distraction when I read something and notice a spelling mistake, particularly if it is on a “professional” site such as a news or business site. When I see something like that, I am unable to take the information on the site seriously. Perhaps I am a bit OCD but it is one of those things that says – “Get a copy editor before you hit the Publish button!

This blog post will not be about Bob Dylan, but rather about some professional changes/challenges I've been up to lately. The most important one is my switch to a new employer. After almost 3 years being happily employed at Ordina Belgium, I'll move to element61 in November. element61 is a Performance Management and Business Intelligence consultancy firm. From their website: "element61 is the thought-leading Business Analytics, Performance Management and Financial Reporting consulting company in the Belgian marketplace.

Earlier this month I attended PASS Summit 2013 in Charlotte, NC. It was my third, and my favorite so far (I say that every year). Among the many activities I got to participate in, I was interviewed for PASStv. (Look for me on day one!) One of the questions the host asked me was, “How did you get here?” He wasn’t asking if I flew or just put on my running shoes and ran for a couple days.

Introduction Last week I found a little bug caused by Anotar. Anotar adds IL code to my assembly. The problem with this bug is that it only manifests itself at runtime or when covered by a test or when doing a PEVerify. Since I don’t claim to have 100% test coverage. I need a way to run PEVErify on my assemblies to make sure I catch any Anotar bugs (So I can report them and Simon can fix them).

What really makes someone working in and around SQL Server truly successful? Adaptability to the requirements we are given, while putting aside what we feel is the only right way to complete a task. Adaptability Without this going into a comparison between consulting and fulltime employment, we’ll look at how you need to be adaptable as it pertains to each task you are confronted with. In the end, consulting and fulltime employment do follow the same standards and are always constrained by the requirements set by a higher entity.

At some point, you may run into problems where the SQL Server Windows service will not start or the services are hung in stopping or starting. In this case, many times the chain of events that brought the services to the state they are in was due to a configuration change, security change in the services or even startup parameter changes. One situation that can be found on a restart is configuration changes that may have happened previously and have not taken affect until the restart that is unrelated.

I started reviewing AngularJS and Knockout because I had some specific projects that I intended to use one of these for and felt the research and comparative examples might prove useful to others. I haven’t compared every aspect of the libraries, just enough to give me an idea which will be better for my specific projects (and hopefully give you a head start on your own decisions). This is the final post in a nine post series looking at the capabilities of knockout and Angular.