my two new desk buddies. interesting pair they are – steve jobs and the drainei.
?

… written by one of our cool DevTeach speakers Peter de Betta?

Yup, it’s a free MS Press Ebook on SQL Server 2008. What else can we SQL Server junkies ask for? (Ok, fine I said that too soon, there’s probably still a fair bit of stuff we want out of SQL Server).

Anyway, this is the link to Peter‘s blog about the book :
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/peter_debetta/archive/2008/09/16/introducing-sql-server-2008-the-book.aspx

This is the excerpt:

To get your free copy, browse to http://www.microsoft.com/learning/sql/2008/default.mspx. From there, look in the Special Offers section for the “Free e-book offer“. Although the site states you can get excerpts, the whole book is available for reading.

Coolio?

DevTeach day
– done my presentation on PowerShell! thanks for my awesome crowd – they stayed with me from PowerShell ground zero to about 20 feet up. You’ve seen the tool now, go make me proud
– also attended Shereen’s session. She’s the master of customizing your SharePoint pages!

DevTeach night
– DevTeach speakers dinner at Sala Thai. Fun and lively chat with Scott Stauffer, Peter de Betta, and Ted Neward. Also brief chat with Kevin Kline and his wife while we were at the lounge waiting to go to dinner. Very nice people!

DevTeach tomorrow
– we have the Black Ninja Booth. Come visit us! We always welcome good chats, hi’s and hellos! We also have a few things to give away (shirts, goodies, and Telerik Web Control license!)
– looking forward to tomorrow’s sessions!

Twitter/Tweetie
– wow this could be very addicting eh? I find myself using my iphone/tweetie more.

Brag Bag
– got nominated for BCIT’s Teaching Excellence Award!! Did I put enough smileys here? Thank you to whoever nominated me, it is a pleasure and privilege and very much appreciated.

That’s it, I’m ready to crash for the night!

Updates : day after
– also fun chats with Don Kiely, Etienne Tremblay, Medhat Elmasry, Brian Pidcock at our Black Ninja booth, and quick chat with Richard Baumet while we were both prepping for our presentations
– when able to sneak out of the booth, attended Sherman Woo’s session on SharePoint Dev tips and tricks, Peter de Betta’s Choosing the Right Encryption Technologies , Kevin Kline’s End to End SQL Server Troubleshooting, Brad McGehee’s SQLDiag presentation; I wish I could have see more presentations!

Jacob Sebastian is a SQL Server XML Guru!

Check out his collection for XQUery Labs. This is the first 12 of his series, and right now he has 43 and counting:

XQuery Sample Scripts

* XQuery Lab 1 – Transforming rows to columns
* XQuery Lab 2 – An example using OUTER APPLY
* XQuery Lab 3 – Filtering specific nodes
* XQuery Lab 4 – Joining XML Nodes with a Relational Table
* XQuery Lab 5 – Working with Namespaces
* XQuery Lab 6 – Processing Header-Detail information
* XQuery Lab 7 – Extracting a comma separated list of values
* XQuery Lab 8 – How to update the attribute value of an XML variable?
* XQuery Lab 9 – How to delete an attribute from an XML variable?
* XQuery Lab 10 – How to insert an attribute to an XML variable
* XQuery Lab 11 – How to insert an element to an XML variable
* XQuery Lab 12 – Different ways of reading values from an XML variable

Jacob Sebastian has also released a free ebook via RedGate – The Art of XSD – SQL Server XML Schema Collections

Check it out, all 483 pages!

I’ve just recently started being active on twitter. Yeah I know that’s pretty late in the game, after Ashton Kutcher passed CNN for the 1 million followers, and after Shaq has changed the face of sports through twitter. Blimey, even PC guy is twittering and has 34,327 followers! Hmm. I should follow PCGuy.

But I got started, and am still learning, mostly from my SQL Server hero Brent Ozar’s posts about twitter!
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Now that you have collected all your information in your SharePoint lists, your business users will want to see reports off them.

You may want to leverage SQL Server Reporting Services for this (I would! I’d love to use SSRS for all the reports I need to create!), but we know it’s not an easy task.
Your options are:
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I’m having a geeky moment and want to get myself a couple of cool custom sqlserver t-shirts. Yeah, I’m a geek (err, geekette), what can I do?

Got one? I want to compile a list

I have posted previously 3 different ways of searching for SQL Server Objects (How to Search for Columns in SQL Server ).

Here’s a fourth one!

Check out how powerful and flexible PowerShell is when you need to look for a database object. In the script below, I only search databases, tables, columns, and indexes. But in reality, really, sky is the limit!
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