PASS Summit trip wrap-up
A recap of attending the PASS Summit in Seattle, followed by a week-long Harley road trip through Northern California.
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How’s the weather in Seattle?
Heading to the PASS Summit in Seattle for the first time, with plans for a Harley Davidson road trip through California afterwards.
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SQL Server word-level bigram function
A T-SQL function for generating word-level bigrams from search strings, useful for building did-you-mean and search auto-suggest systems.
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Tech Ed done, bring on PASS Summit!
Reflections on presenting at Tech Ed New Zealand 2011, feedback and lessons learned, and looking ahead to PASS Summit in Seattle.
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Getting ready for Tech Ed New Zealand
Preparing to present a session at Tech Ed New Zealand about Trade Me's database infrastructure and architecture journey to 70 million page views.
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Snow snow snow!
A rare snowfall hit Wellington, New Zealand, turning the neighbourhood into a winter wonderland and making for an interesting motorbike commute.
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T-SQL Tuesday #21 - Temporarily permanent hacks
Common DBA shortcuts that become permanent tech debt: temporary logging tables, backup table copies, hard-coded values, and scheduled job sprawl.
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Multiple CTE gotcha
A subtle SQL Server gotcha where referencing the wrong CTE in a chain silently skips intermediate steps, producing fast but incorrect results.
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Full-Text Search Operators – Part 4: Wrapping it up
The final part of a series on building a T-SQL Google-like search handler for SQL Server full-text, covering the NEAR operator and command assembly.
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Benchmarking I/O: The test rig
A PowerShell and SQL Server test rig for benchmarking I/O performance across different storage platforms like SAN, SSD, and local disk.
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