WorkTamer Conference 2010

The WorkTamer conference is coming to Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal in 2010!  This is a one-day conference that packs in 18 “soft skills” to boost your IT career.  The session highlights include “How to Get Promoted and Dump Your Pager” by Brent Ozar of Quest Software and “My Co-workers Are 9000 Miles Away! How to Succeed on a Distributed Team” by Denise McInerney of Intuit Software.  Donald Belcham of igloocoder.com will be presenting “Fail Fast and Succeed” and Craig Borysowich from Imagination Edge will present on “Running Better Meetings” (we can all use that one!).  Breakfast and lunch are included with the conference fee.  Register today at http://www.worktamer.com/conference_register.cfm.

Creative T-SQL

This is utterly pointless, yet incredibly brilliant:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Stupid-Coding-Tricks-The-TSQL-Madlebrot.aspx

The night before PASS

It cannot have possibly been a year already. Serves me right for starting a blog - now I have to write something at least annually.

I should have written this on the actual night before PASS. Oh well, we'll use the way back machine to pretend it's the night before PASS 2008 (thank you Blogger backdating). Prometric provided an on-site testing room for SQL Server which was a great idea. The latest tests provide a simplified certification path. This approach is much more "scenario" focused without any of the annoying "how many CPUs does Standard Edition support?" type of question. I highly recommend the tests to any SQL specialists who want a few more letters after their name. I'm usually on the side of experience over acronym but Microsoft has made great strides in the right direction.

On Order At Last

The purchase order has posted for our new SQL Server 2005 system. Our migration from 2000 to 2005 will begin in just two weeks or so. I'll keep this blog updated throughout the process to let everyone know how things compare for our primary application. Let the fun begin!

Aftermarket afterthought

Security is always a huge topic, and rightfully so. For example, leaving the sa password blank allowed more massive server infections via new worm variants. Microsoft added a series of warning screens to help prevent administrators from doing this unintentionally.

So with security being such a hot button, why do so many software applications that use (or can use) SQL Server as a backend database require sysadmin-level access simply to install? There is absolutely no valid reason for requiring this type of access aside from laziness on the part of their programmers. I am continually shocked at the number of times a network admin will ask for a new database for software "X" which will promptly fail to install due to insufficent security rights. More concerning to me is the fact that the technical support for "X" is unable to answer two simple questions: what rights are required for installation and what rights are required for normal use? While I don't expect all support reps to be experts in all the supported databases, I do expect a basic question such as this to at least be addressed in documentation.

Software vendors, are you listening? DBAs don't like to open security to installation programs from vendors that don't define basic security requirements.