I’ve written before about how much I love looking for outliers. One example of this can be found in the post I did on the sysjobhistory table. Recently I was asked to put together some code to find out which backups were “running long”. Of course my first question was trying to define what was [...]
Six Sigma
User Stories
A few weeks ago I was asked to provide a “user story” regarding a project. I had never heard the term before, so I had to go find out what this person was talking about. Binoogle (yeah, that’s right, I still compare searches from Bing and Google) returned the top choice as an article on [...]
Root Cause Analysis – Asking Why?
I have two children, ages six and five (Happy Birthday to the boy today, BTW), and they went through a phase where they would ask “why?” for just about everything imaginable. They either grew out of this phase or grew tired of my circular reasoning which resulted in conversations such as:
“Papa, why [whatever]?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?”
“Because [...]
SQL Server and NULL Values
I seemed to have struck a minor chord with my hatred for database triggers. I had very few comments, but a handful of emails and exchanged even more tweets on the subject. But one thing was made clear to me and that is people wanted to hear about why I disdain NULL values.
Fortunately for me I [...]





