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. Presenting yourself as a consultant is the first stage in being successful in terms of clients and your team. Most times, the client will be the critical variable in the equation to your overall success rate as a consultant.

In a previous post I showed how to get remote disk information with PowerShell. The script works nice until you execute it on a server with Mount Points. When executing the following script on a server with Mount Points: Get-WmiObject win32_logicaldisk -computer <computername> | select-object DeviceID, VolumeName, @{Name="Size";Expression={$_.Size/1GB}},@{Name="FreeSpace";Expression={$_.FreeSpace/1GB}}, @{Name="PCTFreeSpace";Expression={ $_.FreeSpace/$_.Size*100}}|Sort-Object -descending PCTfreespace|format-table I get the following result: Knowing the sizes of my databases, I knew the numbers were wrong.

Today was day three of our Java training, we did mostly OOP stuff today. I also noticed that whenever you do a week of training by the team that Wednesday PM comes along, you are pretty much mush. We covered Object Oriented design, why you would use it, we covered Encapsulation, Inheritance and Polymorphism. You encapsulate functionality in classes, you hide the implementation so that the classes can be treated as black boxes, the person using your classes does not need to know how stuff is implemented, all the person needs to know is what the class does.

Sometimes, as a speaker, the best sessions I’ve presented or co-presented are the ones that are non-technical in nature. One I’ve been fortunate to co-present with Hope Foley (B | @Hope_Foley) is “Consulting – The Good, The Bad, The Ugly”. I’ve received a ton of positive feedback from that session, as well as many questions expanding on the topics. Being a successful consultant involves much more than being a successful DBA or Developer.

I was working with someone today that had little knowledge of navigating SSMS and other common tools for SQL Server. At times, we really need to step back and remember that not everyone touches a tool like SSMS almost daily. That is in part a consulting concept and one that should be taken seriously when it comes to not letting your work with others frustrate you. Remember, if something isn’t going right in a situation, even as minor as retrieving SQL Server configuration information, it typically means you need to be better at how you are explaining it or take a better path to obtaining the information.

Secret: when I was in high school, I was going to grow up to be a high school English teacher and writer. I read voraciously. I wrote endlessly – journals, short stories, poems, and essays. I haven’t become a teacher yet, but I’ve kept my love of writing alive. I’ve been blogging – personally and professionally – for years and even co-authored a book this year! To me, writing is an art form.

Introduction For one of my projects I needed to show the 30 last messages to the user. I was not interested in keeping these messages. So I decided to use a queue. The messages come from different sources and different threads. And the different threads bit is important. The queue Here is what can happen if you use the not threadsafe queue. Let’s take this little example. Imports System.Threading Module Module1 Private _queue As Queue(Of String) Private _count As Integer Sub Main() Console.

This is day two of the Java training that our group is taking. Today nothing really complicated was covered, nobody looked like a zombie yet, I am sure by Friday, that will be different. Here is a quick rundown of what was covered Control statements if The if has to have parentheses and it has to be a boolean expressions if (boolean-expression) {statement}; We also covered the while and do while loop followed by the for loop

With a basis as a system engineer, I became a DBA. And DBA’s don’t often write real DML queries. I can read a query, understand what it’s doing but when I need to read one I need BOL the help me out. Taking the 070-457 Transition Your MCTS on SQL Server to MCSA: SQL Server 2012,Part 1 exam showed me I’m strong in database administration but there was room for improvement for my query skills.

When it comes to importing data from an Excel sheet with SSIS, Excel has quite a reputation. And not a terribly good one. Well deserved, to be honest, because numerous issues can rise when dealing with this piece of software. This blog post will deal with the issue I encounter the most on forums, which is the issue of the mixed data types in one column, also known as "Why is some of my data read as NULL?