One of the values that BlueMetal holds close to how the team has been and is continually being built encompasses the concept of allowing each individual to succeed. This success is based on focusing an individual on the key skills they possess, along with drawing in other co-worker’s mentoring capabilities and experience as a key part in that success. When a BlueMetal employee looks around, even as a consultant that may be segmented off for periods of time, they always can be assured that there is a vast amount of knowledge and personal success readily available for sharing from each person within the BlueMetal team.

“If you could give an aspiring DBA just one piece of advice what would it be?” This was a question posed to me by John Sansom (blog | twitter). Question everything about the data – access to it, security of it, and how it’s being used. I don’t mean this negatively. You can question why a developer wants ‘sa’ access, or why the business wants to implement a feature, or why the same process has been done the same way for ten years when there is a new method that would be faster and more secure – without being negative.

Last week I was in London for NDC-London. And it was a great week. I saw some great sessions and I met some amazing people. The sessions The opening keynote by Dan North about mastery and not craftsmanship hit the nail on the head for me. But then I never believed in the craftsman religion in the first place. I saw elasticsearch in action and I know I have to try that out. I saw Vagrant in action and I have to try that out. I saw Nancy in action and I have to try… oh wait. I saw the kinect in action and was not amazed. I saw simple web in action and will stick with Nancy for now, sorry Mark and Ian. I saw fakes in action and know I definitly don’t want to use that. I saw scala in action and… meh. I saw how to test angularjs and know I don’t do webdev enough to ever put it in practice. I saw octopus deploy in action and will hold of for now. I saw zeromq and know I don’t need that for now. And I saw how RX worked.

Hello and welcome to my blog post for LessThanDot and in this post I will discuss how to setup a working ASP.NET MVC 4 (with Razor) project using the Empty Template. That’s right, a blank project, I didn’t want the templates doing the work for me, I wanted to create a lean project that I had control over and I thought this would be easy enough but I was very wrong and tripped over a couple of times so hopefully this post will avoid any confusion and pain for newbies to the world of ASP.NET MVC (and avoid having to punch their laptop to death).

Availability Groups have come on strong as a true Enterprise high availability feature in SQL Server. While the setup and maintenance of availability groups is fairly straight forward, adding other features into the mix can make operations quite complex and require additional preparations to ensure operations continue, in certain failures. One of those features that may be added with availability groups is transactional replication. Transactional replication and availability groups do get along well enough to function successfully and add great value to business operations. There are considerations, such as the failover partner agent options and a few others to consider. More importantly, the operating state of replicas is something to take into account. For example, in the case of asynchronous disaster and recovery replicas, replication and the log reader will be relying on the same synchronization states in order to proceed with transactions.

Recently some SQL Server instances at a client were upgraded to the latest cumulative update of SQL Server 2012 service pack 1. The reason for this update was the added functionality to create Power View reports on top of Analysis Services Multidimensional. However, one of the instances also has Master Data Services (MDS) installed and after the update we couldn't connect to the Master Data Manage anymore using the browser. There were two separate issues that had to be solved.

We all love ncrunch and now there is a second version coming. And you can all download it. Remco has written an extensive blogpost on what is new and such. So after some arm twisting (I am weak) I installed it on my VS2012 installation. And here is my first impression. And woohoo it now supports the VS dark theme. And the little codecoverage markers no longer overlap with my text.

This post could have also been titled, “A New Job & Everything That Goes Along With It”… My New Job As of today I am happy to announce that I have joined forces with Allen White (b | t) and Kendal Van Dyke (b | t) at UpSearch. I first met Allen when I started attending the Ohio North SQL Server User Group meetings back in 2007. Since then, he has been both a mentor and a friend to me and now I get to add “boss” to the list. I’m looking forward to continuing to grow as I learn from both Allen and Kendal and I’m excited as I look forward to all of the new possibilities that lay ahead of me.

I spend most of my waking day on a computer, using software. Then I get on twitter and share all the many ways that software annoys me, frustrates me, or just plain pisses me off. Because most software sucks. Most software seems to have lost sight of what it is trying to achieve or has chosen mediocrity in order to kick something out the door and label the work “done”. Unfortunately this is the kind of “done” that ends in contract and scope arguments, with overtime paid to the developers and a customer unable to do critical parts of their business. That kind of “done”.

First of all, let me assure you that I did not fall prey to some sort of SPAM. I know as I write this that we are approaching mid-November, not a time when Microsoft awards/renews MVPs. October 1st however was a different story. As a whole, October was an extremely busy month for me and as I prepare to attend my first MVP Summit next week, I have been taking some time to reflect on what a bang it started off with!