This is day twenty-four of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at how to get help

This is day nine of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at something called reinventing the wheel. Just in case your are not familiar with this metaphor or maybe you are not a native English speaker, I will use wikipedia…

This week brought one of the highest achievements in my career and community work. On June 23rd it was announced by Red Gate and SQL Server Central that I had made it into the finalists for the Exceptional DBA of the Year award. WOW! Every time I say it, I still get that feeling in my gut only certain things that you are truly emotional about can bring.

Welcome to the last day of Community Service week for SQL University. Before we get started, I’d like to say it has been nothing short of a pleasure writing the last two weeks for SQL University. All of the discussions and topics we a lot of fun to go over and I’m looking forward to hearing from everyone how they were able to use them. Don’t forget to pass SQL University and the community itself on to the person to your side that may not be aware of them. Let’s keep building this community together!

SQL University is one of the greatest concepts I've seen in the SQL Community. Thanks to Jorge for coming up with it and organizing it. Today we are going to talk about something dear and close to the concept of SQL University. Blogging! Blogs are an important part of the concept of SQL University. With them we can easily bring this wealth of knowledge in the course syllabus format with writers from the SQL Community in a vast geographical range and range of expertise.

We're devoting an entire class to technical forums this week. Forums have been around as long as most of the online community services have been. They offer (mostly) unsolicited help at (mostly) no charge to the person requesting the help. The word mostly worked its way into that last statement quite a bit. There are resources out there that will allow the solicitation of the members and will charge for help. This class is not going to discuss any of those services. Why? Because we are discussing the SQL community and this community truly puts itself out in front of everyone in need wit...

Tuesday marked the day that I presented on SSIS basics. The night went really good and the group and I had a great time during the discussion. Kim Young (needs to be on twitter) started us off with stored procedures and error handling and moved into Wendy plugging PASS and the community.

SQL Saturday in Chicago is only days away now and the excitement is building. I feel an explanation is in order for my lack of contributions to the SQL community the last few weeks.

Don’t be afraid to call your vendor and begin to create a professional relationship with them. Always work together to build on the systems that are working hard to keep both companies alive.

I want to first apologize to anyone that regularly reads my blog and some of the babble I throw on lessthandot.com while I learn SQL Server and grow as a DBA. My family recently moved into our new house and time has been very limited. Things are going well and the hectic schedule I call the SQL Pump is slowly coming back into its normal stride.

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