Kathi Kellenberger 21 August 2019

Goodbye to the Microsoft Professional Program

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I’ve worked with Microsoft technologies for over 20 years and, during that time, earned a good income to support my family and have a comfortable life. Despite that, Microsoft manages to break my heart again and again. Take the sad saga of the Windows Phone. I was working for Microsoft when the first Windows Phones … Read more

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Kathi Kellenberger 12 August 2019

Hiding What You Shouldn’t See

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Editorials

Back when I was working on a master’s degree, one of our professors told us a story about a colleague who learned how to navigate the Unix system. She was so thrilled about learning this new skill that, in her exuberance, she stumbled upon some hidden human resource files containing confidential information. Eventually, an administrator … Read more

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Kathi Kellenberger 02 August 2019

Reporting Services Basics: Parameters

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Kathi Kellenberger continues her series on SSRS. In this article you learn how to use parameters that let your report users control how the reports are filtered.… Read more

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Kathi Kellenberger 23 July 2019

Measuring the Right Things

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Editorials

In my previous career many years ago, I worked at a hospital along with about ten other pharmacists. The department manager came up with one primary metric for evaluating pharmacists: the average time taken to fill each drug order. While this system did produce a metric, it was the wrong one. The worst pharmacist in … Read more

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Kathi Kellenberger 10 July 2019

SQL Server 2019: Features for the Rest of Us

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I was talking recently with a friend about features of SQL Server 2019 (still in CTP at the time of this writing). I thought that while Microsoft provides features that will benefit any size shop, the exciting new feature they are promoting is Big Data Clusters. This feature allows you to query data from many … Read more

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Kathi Kellenberger 05 July 2019

Reporting Services Basics: Understanding Data Sources and Datasets

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Data sources and datasets are critical components of an SSRS report, but many people new to SSRS struggle to understand them. In this article, Kathi Kellenberger shows you how to create these components and explains when they should be shared vs. embedded. … Read more

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Kathi Kellenberger 20 June 2019

The State of SQL Server Monitoring 2019

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UPDATE: Read the full report here. Recently, over 800 participants across a range of sectors and from all around the globe took part in a survey about the state of SQL Server monitoring. This survey from Redgate Software is the only one of its kind and is in its second year. Here are some significant … Read more

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Kathi Kellenberger 19 June 2019

Keeping Kids Busy During Long School Breaks

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Editorials

Now that school is out for the summer, my grandson Thomas is spending quite a bit of time at our house. This year his parents decided that, at 12 years old, he was too old to go to a day-care/summer camp program. He will probably take over quite a bit of the yard work and … Read more

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Kathi Kellenberger 30 May 2019

Reporting Services Basics: Creating Your First Report

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In this article, Kathi Kellenberger demonstrates how to create a project and report using the SSRS Report Wizard. The wizard is fine for getting started, but you’ll soon learn about its many limitations. She also explains how reports fit in projects and solutions.… Read more

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Kathi Kellenberger 28 May 2019

Innovation: A Double-edged Sword

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Editorials

We humans have been the most successful animals on earth. We’ve accomplished this by changing the environment to suit our needs instead of always adapting ourselves to fit the environment. We use tools, we invent, and we solve problems. Of course, many other species use crude tools, but none have done anything like inventing computers, … Read more

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Kathi Kellenberger 09 May 2019

Why DBAs Must Embrace DevOps

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A good day for a database administrator (DBA) is a lot like a good airline flight. A lot of excitement in either situation is bad. In a perfect world, a DBA will be productive and not spending most of their time “putting out fires.” (And fires are never a good idea on a flight!) DBAs … Read more

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Kathi Kellenberger 17 April 2019

The Future of Medicine

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If you are a Star Trek fan, you’ve seen the future of medicine, or at least how the writers imagine it will be. Painless, needleless injections are given by hypospray devices, right through clothing with no chance of cross-contamination. The medical tricorder provides an accurate diagnosis in seconds. Broken bones, illnesses, and injuries are quickly … Read more

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Kathi Kellenberger 08 April 2019

Reporting Services Basics: Overview and Installation

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SQL Server Reporting Services has changed quite a bit since it was introduced in 2004. Despite new analytic services like Power BI, SSRS is still a popular tool for paginated reports. In this article, Kathi Kellenberger explains the architecture of SSRS and walks you through installing an SSRS development environment on your workstation or laptop.… Read more

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Kathi Kellenberger 03 April 2019

Scary Stories from the Trenches

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If you have worked with databases long enough, you probably have many frightening stories to tell about things that have gone awry on the job or problems that were difficult to solve. Accidently dropping a table or trying to fix an issue with the CIO standing right in your cube, repeatedly asking if you’ve fixed … Read more

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Kathi Kellenberger 12 March 2019

Help Shape the Future of SQL Monitor

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Each year, Redgate runs a survey to ask the folks at companies, from DBAs and Devs to CIOs, about how they monitor SQL Server. Those insights help us understand how we can make SQL Monitor more valuable to DBAs – or anyone responsible for the “care and feeding” of a SQL Server. The Estate Management … Read more

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Kathi Kellenberger 04 March 2019

Celebrating Women in Tech

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NASA recently named a facility in honour of Katherine Johnson, the mathematician who performed the calculations for space flights in the 50s and 60s. She was one of the “human computers” whose stories were made famous by the movie Hidden Figures just a few years ago. Until that movie was released, the contributions of these … Read more

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Kathi Kellenberger 20 February 2019

Protecting Data During Development

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In the years before joining Redgate, I was a SQL Server database consultant. I spent a lot of time doing SQL Server health checks, query tuning, and ETL (extract, transform, and load) development. Every customer was different and getting to the resources I needed to do the job at each shop varied as well. I … Read more

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Kathi Kellenberger 11 February 2019

The Performance of Window Aggregates Revisited with SQL Server 2019

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T-SQL window functions have been a fantastic addition to the T-SQL language. In this article, Kathi Kellenberger reviews how optimizations available in SQL Server 2019 can improve the performance of these functions.… Read more

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Kathi Kellenberger 12 December 2018

Where’s the Bottleneck?

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Editorials

Delta Airlines recently announced that they have implemented the first fully biometric terminal in the US, at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport F Terminal with plans for Detroit late 2019. This means that, instead of scanning boarding passes and looking at passports for international flights at the checkpoints, the airline can just scan each passenger’s face … Read more

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Kathi Kellenberger 03 December 2018

Three Books That Have Influenced My Career

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I’m a lifelong learner. One of the ways I love to learn is by reading books. While I was making the transition to software development from my original career, I read the book “Code Complete” by Steve McConnell. This was back in the mid-90s before the Agile Manifesto was written or DevOps was a thing. … Read more

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Compliant Database DevOps

By need

By role

Kathi Kellenberger