Jen McCown

So you may have noticed that MidnightDBA looks a bit different.  Quite a bit prettier, and a little big uglier.  This week we pushed our upgrade…tah-dah!!  The site is still a little rough, and we'll be putting in big work this weekend.  BUT, the new site features some pretty exciting stuff:

• For us, a much easier video deployment process.  It has a (drumroll-please)…..SQL back end!
• For you, the ability to move columns around, and sort the lists of videos by any column.  So if you want to see the longest videos in, say, the Dev section, just click on the "Length" heading!  Sweeeet….
• Video preview images (thumbnails).  This is especially amusing on the DBAs@Midnight page 
• Author bios and pix

And we have a full list of other improvements we want to make. First things first though, gotta work out the formatting and other bugs.

And I have a couple of new articles on SQL Server Pedia:  First, a thorough introduction to Joins: "In a SELECT statement we know that the first (select) phrase tells us what columns we’ll be receiving, FROM tells us what table they live in, WHERE limits the set of rows we get back, and so on. So what about JOINs? It turns out, JOINs are all about the math, baby. Stay with me here, this won’t hurt."

And now, a little TSQL script I like to call Compare Column Definitions Between Two Tables: "This week I went looking around for a quick bit of code to compare two similar tables – I had to find the mismatched datatypes and NULL settings – and I didn't find anything I liked. So I wrote this!"

Happy days, all!

-Jen McCown, http://www.MidnightDBA.com

Free is greatness.  Please to enjoy:

North Texas User Group Next Week!

North Texans (and anyone in earshot): Free training, networking, and SQL community ties at the North Texas SQL Server User Group.  Next meeting is in a week, Thursday 9/17.  Topic this month is "Bad SQL – Why Does This "Perfectly Good" T-SQL Run So Slow?"

Oops…

Ok, sorry folks…it looks like this wasn't a legit free offering.  So sorry all, and especially to the authors of said book.  That's what I get for being naiive….

More Free Goodness!

-Jen McCown, http://www.MidnightDBA.com

I realize that blogs full of links to other blogs can be fairly annoying…I promise to limit how often I do this. But I just realized not everyone is on Twitter, and not everyone follows the folks I do. So you may've missed a few gems I picked up:

• First off, Sean's (of course) Database Underground blog on Infoworld. He posted a new entry yesterday, "Is SQL Server's latest security hole a real threat?", about the recent Sentrigo/Microsoft spat over plain text passwords in memory.  I think the video he made on the same topic especially is pretty awesome, because he shows you step-by-step how easy it is to hack passwords, and gives you a few reasons to care.  Hey, what can I say, I'm a fan AND a geek.

• Paul Randal, sooooper geeeeenius, recently began a blog with "I'm constantly surprised by the number of people that don't follow the CSS SQL blog – some of the best SQL people in the industry post there."  Now, I hadn't been following CSS SQL blog, but I've started.  I pass the link on to you.
  BTW, if you do follow @PaulRandal on Twitter, doesn't his pic make you think of Ari from "Entourage"?

• And I just tweeted about the absolute best article on IT personality and management, evar, evar, EVAR. It's called "Opinion: The unspoken truth about managing geeks" by Jeff Ello.  I want to quote the whole entire thing, but I will restrain myself somewhat. 
  • Article begins: "I can sum up every article, book and column written by notable management experts about managing IT in two sentences: "Geeks are smart and creative, but they are also egocentric, antisocial, managerially and business-challenged, victim-prone, bullheaded and credit-whoring. To overcome these intractable behavioral deficits you must do X, Y and Z.""

   

  • "IT pros will prefer a jerk who is always right over a nice person who is always wrong. Wrong creates unnecessary work, impossible situations and major failures. Wrong is evil, and it must be defeated."

   

  • "IT pros are sensitive to logic — that's what you pay them for. When things don't add up, they are prone to express their opinions on the matter, and the level of response will be proportional to the absurdity of the event."

   

  • "IT pros will self-organize, disrupt and subvert in the name of accomplishing work."

That barely scratches the surface of Jeff's article.  Go, go and read. Thank me later.

-Jen McCown, http://www.MidnightDBA.com