Update: Congratulations to Doug Tucker who won this competition on July 21 with his caption “Murphy begins to rethink his top-down methodology.” Startling picture in need of a caption. Submit your applications below. Poor Billy, he learned how to scale up applications, but could never figure out how to scale down! Isn’t this a way … Read more
Update: Congratulations to Fatherjack who won this competition on July 7 with his caption “Little known fact: the ‘S’ in SQL used to stand for Semaphore.” Once again, we call upon our readers to amuse and enlighten us by providing funny captions to peculiar pictures. This week: When Trevor put his headphones on, he wanted … Read more
Update: Congrats to rananjali who won with this week’s competition with a caption on migrations. Thanks to everyone who wrote in! Once again we ask: What’s going on here? The best caption wins a $50 Amazon voucher. Computer-y answers for preference, but don’t let a lack of electronics stop you from dazzling us with your … Read more
Congratulations to Doug Tucker for winning this week’s caption competition with: Having caught yet another developer logged into a production database, Joe dons his DBA hazmat suit and prepares to deploy a different sort of logon trigger. Please to be informing us what might be going on here. Anything faintly computer-themed will always help, but … Read more
Update! This competition is now closed. The winner was jkeefe with “Here’s a shot of our intrepid DBA personally testing the first-ever log shipping apparatus!”. Some suggestions to get your comedy juices flowing: “So long chaps, hope you can continue to cope without a written disaster plan!” – said the only DBA “These shoes cost … Read more
UPDATE: Congrats to Conan who won this caption competition with: “Darling, now that you’re working from home, you can just wear pajamas like everyone else.” Thanks to everyone who participated! Finding himself interrupted during work on his laptop, this old-timey gentleman and lady exchange a word. But what was said? That’s what we want to … Read more
Heartbleed is the big issue of the day, we hope that everyone has changed their passwords and updated their certificates. If you aren’t sure what to do or if you’ve been living under a rock, Troy Hunt’s written a pretty exhaustive blog post about it which you should check out. For a significantly shorter overview, … Read more
This beginner's guide by Jonathan Kehayias and Erin Stellato covers the basics of using wait statistics; topics include the SQLOS scheduler, performance tuning, baselines, and more.… Read more
Google uses a Google+ account to uniquely identify individual authors. This isn't only so they can put portraits in Google search results, but also enables them to gauge the ranking of the article, so it could be very important to authors.… Read more
Throughout December, Simple-Talk and SQL Server Central hosted the Tribal Awards. With these awards, we let the technical community choose members who they felt deserved recognition by opening up both nominations and voting to the public. We’re very pleased to be able to announce the winners for each category listed below. The winners were decided … Read more
Every article that is published on Simple-talk gets edited. With books, the editorial process is even more rigorous. What are the editors up to? Really, it is just checking that what is written conforms with rules such as these.… Read more
On Simple-Talk, we like to have some book reviews. Unlike articles, we cannot pay for book reviews, but neither does Amazon! If you fancy reviewing a technical book on SQL Server, .NET or PowerShell, then Simple-Talk is a platform which will guarantee that your review will be widely read. Here are a few guidelines, just to get you started.… Read more
To write a technical article, one just surely needs technical knowledge. Well, no. The very best technical writers take enormous pains to present information in an interesting way. This isn't a mysterious art at all, and the technique can be learned just as easily as square-dancing. Journalists are taught the technique though they often forget. We give just a few pointers.… Read more
I don’t know what it’s like in your offices right now, but at the Simple-talk HQ, it’s that time of year when things start to wind down for a week or so. There is often a final flurry of blogging activity before all goes quiet until the New Year. O come, all on Facebook ‘Like’ … Read more
