Louis Davidson

Louis is the editor of this Simple-Talk website. Prior to that, has was a corporate database developer and data architect for a non-profit organization for 25 years! Louis has been a Microsoft MVP since 2004, and is the author of a series of SQL Server Database Design books, most recently Pro SQL Server Relational Database Design and Implementation.

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09 June 2011
09 June 2011

What Counts for A DBA – Logic

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“There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who will always wonder why there are only two items in my list and those who will figured it out the first time they saw this very old joke.”  Those readers who will give up immediately and get frustrated with me for not explaining it … Read more
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06 June 2011
06 June 2011

See you in Columbus Saturday?

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Assuming all goes as planned, I will be in Columbus, OH this Friday night and Saturday for SQL Saturday 75. I really love SQL Saturday events the best of all of the events because they are very intimate in nature. As a fairly antisocial person, I sometimes get overwhelmed by the size of other events, … Read more
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06 May 2011
06 May 2011

What Counts For A DBA: Curiosity

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It is a well-known saying that “curiosity killed the cat,” but is this really not as true as it might sound; right up to the end of our devoted cat’s long life, she constantly poked around into places we didn’t want her to, but always approached new things cautiously and generally knew when to run … Read more
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06 May 2011
06 May 2011

SQLPASS Submissions

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So I am a bit hesitant to post this because the past few times I have posted about something I have submitted they have failed to occur.  But hey, I might as well. If I don’t I might get all 5 sessions I submitted and have to do them.. and that would be super tiring. … Read more
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16 April 2011
16 April 2011

What Counts For a DBA: Failure

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My family and I enjoy sitting down together to watch the TV show called “Wipeout“. The contestants try to run wacky obstacle courses filled with various bizarre and fiendish obstacles in the fastest possible time. Failure is a guaranteed occurrence; contestants run into fake walls, get hit by “cartoon” hammers, and generally end up falling … Read more
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12 April 2011
12 April 2011

Big League Technical Staff

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So I was blissfully reading the twitter feed when @Tim_Mitchell tweeting the following article Consultants are pros, while corporate IT staff are minor leaguers by Erik Eckel, that for some reason seems to exist to feed the need that IT staffers have to despise consultants who come in and are listened to, often when there … Read more
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01 April 2011
01 April 2011

What Counts for a DBA: Adventurousness

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This post (hopefully obviously) was my April Fool’s day post. I assume that was quite obvious as everything in this post was opposite of the common reality (and really, is adventurousness even vaguely a word?)   The fact is though, while you can pretty much toss a boolean NOT() operator around the entire article and … Read more
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10 March 2011
10 March 2011

What Counts for a DBA: Humility

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In football (the American sort, naturally,) there is a select group of players who really hope to never have their names called during the game. They are members of the offensive line, and their job is to protect other players so they can deliver the ball to the goal to score points. When you do … Read more
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22 February 2011
22 February 2011

Chapters Two, Three, and Four

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I am trying to blog all of the chapters of the book, but due to deadlines and a lot of shuffling about, I never got around it for these three chapters, two of which I have added since I wrote the original table of contents. All of these contain mostly material from previous editions of … Read more
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15 February 2011
15 February 2011

What Counts for a DBA: Skill

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“Practice makes perfect:” right? Well, not exactly. The reality of it all is that this saying is an untrustworthy aphorism. I discovered this in my “younger” days when I was a passionate tennis player, practicing and playing 20+ hours a week. No matter what my passion level was, without some serious coaching (and perhaps a … Read more
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09 February 2011
09 February 2011

Some date math fun

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Note: This concept presented is pretty simple and I am not claiming that I am the first to do this… so if you were the one who came up with this, let me know and I will give you linkage Today I was needing to get the data for the current month for a query, … Read more
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