The Murder Accountability Project is worth a look. It’s a reminder that gathering good data is hard, but once you have the data you can do interesting things – like identify serial killings. The site says 220,000 unsolved homicides in the US since 1980. A big number, but not big data – doesn’t always take a ton of data to reveal interesting stuff.
I've grown up reading Tom Clancy and probably most of you have at least seen Red October, so this book caught my eye when browsing used books for a recent trip. It's a fairly human look at what's involved in sailing on a Trident missile submarine...
2009-03-10
1,439 reads
Question: Can a 2008 SQL instance be used as the witness for a 2005 database mirroring setup? This question was sent to me via email. My reply follows. Can a 2008 SQL instance be used as the witness for a 2005 database mirroring setup? Databases to be mirrored are currently running on 2005 SQL instances but will be upgraded to 2008 SQL in the near future.
2009-02-23
1,567 reads
In which Phil illustrates an old trick using STUFF to intert a number of substrings from a table into a string, and explains why the technique might speed up your code...
2009-02-18
1,631 reads
You may want to read Part 1 , Part 2 , and Part 3 before continuing. This time around I'd like to talk about social networking. We'll start with social networking. Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are all good examples of using technology to let...
2009-02-17
1,530 reads
Last week I posted Speaking at Community Events - Time to Raise the Bar?, a first cut at talking about to what degree we should require experience for speakers at events like SQLSaturday as well as when it might be appropriate to add additional focus/limitations on the presentations that are accepted. I've got a few more thoughts on the topic this week, and I look forward to your comments.
2009-02-13
360 reads
