The Successful Consulting Series is a set of articles that are being written to both, help decisions on joining the consulting field and also, help existing consultants in their professional development initiatives. Please visit, “Successful Consulting Series” for a full listing of each part in this series. Something that has stuck with me after talking to Matt Kestian, General Manager of BlueMetal in Chicago, is the concept of hiring and the important factors that lead to not only a successful team member, but a successful team. Matt explained the concept of hiring into a level that is needed to be successful in the form that skills can be added, gained, and earned with hard work by working with any consultant or employee. What cannot be taught are the will, ambition and putting energy that are needed into your position to be successful, competitive, and embedded deeply into a highly performing team. That advice and explanation will stay with me for years to come when both training and discussing success in consulting.

This is day seventeen of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at what happens when people become stubborn and somehow attached to their code. If you are in a hole, stop digging!!! Somehow we as programmers and developers get sometimes emotionally attached to the code and applications that we create. We think of them as our little babies, it is like we see them grow up, we see the first time they start up and print a line or do an update statement, before you know it they manipulate the whole database and are responsible for some major business revenue. Unfortunately in real life you get one change to steer your kids into the right direction and helping them make correct choices. Don’t get attached to your code. If you see problems with it, drop a class or two, delete what doesn’t work, it is okay…the compiler won’t hate you or talk back to you (unless of course you count error messages and compile errors as talking back)

Originally this blog post would have had the title "Disabling aggregations over a parent-child hierarchy", but I thought it could create confusion with the Aggregation Design concept in Analysis Services (SSAS), which is something completely different. What I want to describe in this blog post is a method forcing a parent-child hierarchy in SSAS to show the parent's own data value, instead of the sum of the aggregated values of its children. Why would I want to do such a thing? A client of mine once asked me to create a cube on some financial data. However, the data was delivered by a 3rd party and could not be changed. This means that a parent-child hierarchy – for example the chart of accounts on a Profit&Loss report – should display the values from the database, not vpalues calculated or aggregated by SSAS. In most cases the values would have been the same, but sometimes it wouldn't, hence the need to create an alternative solution.

Following on from a comment on a previous post, this post will demonstrate how to use XML::Feed and Template::Toolkit to format your recent Stackoverflow activity, suitable for including on your own web page. Aptly, this was aided by a stackoverflow question! This time we can use XML::Feed both to get and parse the feed: use XML::Feed; my $feed = XML::Feed->parse(URI->new('http://stackoverflow.com/feeds/user/1691146')); We need to adapt the template to account for XML::Feed’s differences: my $template = <<"TEMPLATE"; [% feed.title %] Activity: [% FOREACH item = feed.items %] [% item.issued.dmy %] [% item.issued.hms %]t[% item.title %] [% END %] TEMPLATE And the template toolkit invocation:

This is day sixteen of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at the lack of database design and normalization. Normalization and database design is a big enough topic that there are 500 page plus books written about it. This post will barely scratch the surface, if you want to know more about this topic pick up a book about it. Pro SQL Server 2008 Relational Database Design and Implementation is one that I recommend. I did an interview with the author here: Interview With Louis Davidson Author of Pro SQL Server 2008 Relational Database Design and Implementation

This is day fifteen of the [SQL Advent 2012 series][1] of blog posts. Today we are going to look at the benefit of indexes So how does an index work? How does an index work, how does it help SQL Server finding stuff faster? Here is an simple non technology explanation. If I told you to grab a cookbook and give me all the recipes in that book for cod, what would you do? There are two things yuo can do, you can read through the whole book page by page until you get to the last page looking for any cod recipes. Or………..take a look at the picture below

Introduction I have been playing with Nancy for a few days now. And yesterday was an extremely bad day. I was adding layouts so I could have a masterpage and I was adding services so I could get some data and save some data. I wanted to save my data n a collection and keep it in memory just for now. And I needed a bootstrapper for that (I’ll explain why a bit later. But my bootstrapper never got loaded and making the razor views was a pain because I never got to see the errormessages why a view was failing. So anyway here is the story about the bootstrapper that got lost.

The Successful Consulting Series is a set of articles that are being written to both, help decisions on joining the consulting field and also, help existing consultants in their professional development initiatives. Please visit, “Successful Consulting Series” for a full listing of each part in this series. This is in addition to Hope Foley’s excellent blog posted today on, Easy and Difficult Clients. The subject is such a good one and one to focus on, we both wanted to write a little on it.

This is day fourteen of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at when we should say no to your boss, coworkers or the company you are consulting for. A couple of weeks ago someone came to me asking me for some help because he had a syntax error in a query, this person asked me to help him fix this error, something about an error near a single quote. I thought to myself, this is a 3 second fix, I’ll walk over, fix the query and go back to what I was doing. The fix was very easy, then this person asked me if we could add one column from another table to this query….. after all was said and done I actually was there for almost two hours and ended up writing a whole proc for this person. But lesson learned, you can bait and switch me once but not twice, now when this person ask me for something I always ask right away if that all he wants. It is easy to say no to a person like this, saying no to your boss or the business users probably needs more courage.

 The Successful Consulting Series is a set of articles that are being written to both, help decisions on joining the consulting field and also, help existing consultants in their professional development initiatives. Please visit, “Successful Consulting Series” for a full listing of each part in this series. Consulting is a lot like Christmas. You get to unwrap a new SQL Server environment and find out what all fun stuff awaits inside of it. But wait, there’s another present under the tree, a new client comes with it! Some may think I’m crazy but I like that part of the job too. I am exposed all the time to new clients, and new glimpses of how a new set of people work together (or don’t). I get to see a new business and the dynamics of the people who work there. I have some clients who are great and I consider great friends now. I also have worked with plenty of, well let’s just say more challenging clients. If you go into each new client prepared for both ends of the spectrum, which will probably help your sanity.