On occasion Twitter accounts get hacked and are used to send out spam to other twitter followers, usually via Direct Message. When your twitter account is taken over there are two different things that you need to do in order to get your account back under your control. The first is pretty straight forward, change [...]

So Microsoft TechEd is quickly approaching. If you wanted to sign up for a pre-con there is still time, and plenty of space left available at both the North America and Europe TechEd pre-cons. These pre-cons are full day long sessions, being presented in this case by Tom LaRock and myself. In this session, [...]

So the other day I was having one of those days.  Nothing was going right, systems just didn’t want to work correctly, and Java had just pissed me off for the last time.  To put this into perspective Kris took her laptop into the living room to get some stuff done on it so that [...]

While installing a clustered SQL Server instance recently I ran across a bit of an annoyance.  When I was going through the SQL Installation process I didn’t pay any attention to which node of the cluster currently owned all the disks that I was planning on using for SQL Server.  Because of this when I [...]

As I’ve been going through the process of getting my slide decks for Tech Ed, SQL Server Day 2012 and SQL Rally I’ve recome reminded that this whole process of writing presentations is actually pretty hard work.  Writting abstracts and getting them submitted is the easiest part of the entire process.  After that comes the [...]

So it appears that May is going to be one of the busier travel months for me this year (at least so far).  With three important week long events scheduled for this month it’s going to be a hell of a month. First is SQL Rally where I’m in Dallas Texas from May 7th-12th (I’ve got [...]

One of the many projects which I had the pleasure of working on during the second half of 2011 and the first quarter of 2012 was Wrox’s Professional SQL Server 2012 Administration which was just recently published.  Now I didn’t write the whole book, hell I didn’t even write 1/4 of the book but I [...]

In case you missed my announcement earlier this week over on SecuringSQLServer.com… I’m pleased to be able to announce that the 2nd edition of Securing SQL Server is going to be available soon.  It’s just been made available for pre-order on Amazon.com.  The second edition comes in at about 350 pages (according to Amazon, I [...]

This past week the University of Florida decided that they no longer need to teach their customers (let’s be realistic with decisions like this, colleges don’t have students anymore they have customers) Computer Science. This is doing a major disservice to the customers of the University of Florida. Computer Sciences (and STEM in [...]

Microsoft has recently released hot fix 388724 under MS KB 2687741 which resolves a performance issue when failing over a SQL Server 2012 Availability Group from one replica to another. The basic jist of the problem is that there was an issue with the inter-node communication within the Windows cluster which caused the AG to take [...]