In many of the PASS Conferences I’ve attended I can usually point to one thing I learned that was the most valuable. Usually this was enough to justify the cost of the entire conference. I learned something that would save me so much time or money it would “pay”…
I wrote earlier on ways I’m storing some of my files offsite [http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/billg/archive/2009/05/04/Storing-My-Files-in-the-Cloud.aspx] . Since then I’ve made a small change. Previously I used JungleDisk to copy shared folders on my HP Windows Home…
I’m speaking Tuesday morning on Understanding the Procedure Cache [http://www.sqlteach.com/wconnect/wc.dll?FournierTransformation~1,5,1,1691] at DevTeach\SQLTeach in Montreal. This is the same presentation I delivered at the recent PASS European Conference. At PASS I missed being the top speaker in the…
It seems like all I post anymore is ClearTrace releases. I guess that’s not a bad thing. The next build is available [http://www.cleardata.biz/cleartrace/download.aspx]. This is the full release of the multi-user functionality. In earlier versions all I cared about was performance. I…
Google Reader just introduced functionality to create “bundles” of feeds [http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2009/05/life-is-great-bundle-of-little-things.html] . I subscribe to roughly 60 SQL Server blogs that I read on a regular basis. You can download an OPML [http://www.google.com/reader/public/…
I’ve really enjoyed reading the blog posts and tweets from people that are reviewing the PASS abstracts for the Summit this fall. I was involved in that process for four years and still have fond memories of it. It’s a tremendous amount of work to review each abstract…
I originally started writing ClearTrace [http://www.cleardata.biz/cleartrace/] because Microsoft hadn’t released Read80Trace for SQL Server 2005. They finally did release it but by then I had a pretty handy little utility. Because I was writing it for myself I made some “interesting” design decisions along the…
I originally envisioned ClearTrace as a service that could run in the background and process trace files. As I wrote more and more code the service and command-line versions weren’t kept up to date. I kept adding more and more caching to improve performance. That had the unfortunate…
This is the first release of the command-line version. If you have any feedback, please post in the ClearTrace support forum [http://www.sqlteam.com/forums/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=27] on SQLTeam.com. This provides all the trace loading features of the GUI. You’ll still need the…
I spent an annoying afternoon with SQL Server 2008 today. When we installed it on our cluster it created a job called “syspolicy_purge_history”. I assume it does this in most installations but I haven’t checked. The job was generating an error every time it ran. A quick…