Photos of London
On my recent Europe trip, I spent a rainy day walking around London and snapped some photos.

WorkTamer Conference in Vancouver January 2010
I’m comin’ to Canada! Michael Lato of Datatamer put together a really neat one-day conference that focuses on the soft skills side of IT.  These presentations will help you get IT-related skills you need to get ahead in your career. Here’s my presentations: Inbox Zero: The Art of Email No Photoshop Involved If you’re using Outlook rules to filter server alert emails out of your inbox, or if

Microsoft MVPs: NDA + Twitter = Yammer
Every year, Microsoft MVPs gather for a summit where they talk about <NDA> and <NDA>.  Just like any other conference, they want to talk about this stuff over social networking sites like Twitter, but they can’t because it’s NDA. There’s an app for that. Yammer Yammer is a free private version of Twitter.  You sign up with your company’s email address, and you can onl

Jamie Thomson’s whistlestop tour of SSIS addins
At #SQLbits, Jamie Thomson (Blog – Twitter) demoed the following SSIS add-ins: Kimball SDC Trace File Source XMLify File Watcher Dynamic Data Flow Rank Transform Normaliser Twitter Compression XMLify Jamie find this useful when parsing error output from other SSIS steps, which often have several result sets with different columns.  XMLify dumps all of the data into a single XML file for easier error storage. It’s currently only available for SQL 2

Simon Sabin’s talk on query performance
At #SQLbits, Simon Sabin (Blog – Twitter) talked about car crash queries: queries that suddenly have bad performance out of nowhere, yet if you copy/paste them into SQL Server Management Studio, they run quickly.  The culprit is often parameter sniffing: the engine looks at the query and builds a plan, but if the parameters in the WHERE clause (or joins or whatever) change that plan may not work right anymore.