The Successful Consulting Series is a set of articles that are being written to both, help decisions on joining the consulting field and also, help existing consultants in their professional development initiatives. Please visit, “Successful Consulting Series” for a full listing of each part in this series. Something that has stuck with me after talking to Matt Kestian, General Manager of BlueMetal in Chicago, is the concept of hiring and the important factors that lead to not only a successful team member, but a successful team.

This is day seventeen of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at what happens when people become stubborn and somehow attached to their code. If you are in a hole, stop digging!!! Somehow we as programmers and developers get sometimes emotionally attached to the code and applications that we create. We think of them as our little babies, it is like we see them grow up, we see the first time they start up and print a line or do an update statement, before you know it they manipulate the whole database and are responsible for some major business revenue.

Originally this blog post would have had the title "Disabling aggregations over a parent-child hierarchy", but I thought it could create confusion with the Aggregation Design concept in Analysis Services (SSAS), which is something completely different. What I want to describe in this blog post is a method forcing a parent-child hierarchy in SSAS to show the parent's own data value, instead of the sum of the aggregated values of its children.

Following on from a comment on a previous post, this post will demonstrate how to use XML::Feed and Template::Toolkit to format your recent Stackoverflow activity, suitable for including on your own web page. Aptly, this was aided by a stackoverflow question! This time we can use XML::Feed both to get and parse the feed: use XML::Feed; my $feed = XML::Feed->parse(URI->new('http://stackoverflow.com/feeds/user/1691146')); We need to adapt the template to account for XML::Feed’s differences:

This is day sixteen of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at the lack of database design and normalization. Normalization and database design is a big enough topic that there are 500 page plus books written about it. This post will barely scratch the surface, if you want to know more about this topic pick up a book about it. Pro SQL Server 2008 Relational Database Design and Implementation is one that I recommend.

This is day fifteen of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at the benefit of indexes So how does an index work? How does an index work, how does it help SQL Server finding stuff faster? Here is an simple non technology explanation. If I told you to grab a cookbook and give me all the recipes in that book for cod, what would you do?

Introduction I have been playing with Nancy for a few days now. And yesterday was an extremely bad day. I was adding layouts so I could have a masterpage and I was adding services so I could get some data and save some data. I wanted to save my data n a collection and keep it in memory just for now. And I needed a bootstrapper for that (I’ll explain why a bit later.

The Successful Consulting Series is a set of articles that are being written to both, help decisions on joining the consulting field and also, help existing consultants in their professional development initiatives. Please visit, “Successful Consulting Series” for a full listing of each part in this series. This is in addition to Hope Foley’s excellent blog posted today on, Easy and Difficult Clients. The subject is such a good one and one to focus on, we both wanted to write a little on it.

This is day fourteen of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at when we should say no to your boss, coworkers or the company you are consulting for. A couple of weeks ago someone came to me asking me for some help because he had a syntax error in a query, this person asked me to help him fix this error, something about an error near a single quote.

The Successful Consulting Series is a set of articles that are being written to both, help decisions on joining the consulting field and also, help existing consultants in their professional development initiatives. Please visit, “Successful Consulting Series” for a full listing of each part in this series. Consulting is a lot like Christmas. You get to unwrap a new SQL Server environment and find out what all fun stuff awaits inside of it.