The SQL Down Under Code Camp finished this afternoon after a successful couple of days, but was marred by the news that Catherine Eibner, whose company sponsored the Influencers Party at TechEd AU this year, had shattered her wrist and was in hospital having surgery. Catherine is becoming a big supporter of the SQL Server community in Australia, ...

Yesterday we had Christine Bishop come to Adelaide. She's the Product Marketing Manager for SQL Server and BI for Microsoft Australia. That makes her handy to know if you're in the SQL space, and we had a nice crowd come along to the user group to meet her. One thing that made this meeting different to the usual is that Christine ...

A few people have asked me what my favourite thing is in SQL Server 2008 ("Katmai"). But my favourite thing isn't actually a feature at all, it's a mindset that Microsoft are taking with it. This mindset is "We will only put features into the CTPs once they are basically complete - including the documentation." And ...

What a great week for Adelaide having Australian SQL MVPs presenting! Code Camp SA on the weekend of July 7th and 8th features the Gregs (Linwood and Low), and BI expert Darren Gosbell will be coming to speak to the Adelaide SQL Server User Group the following Thursday. He'll be presenting about MDX, which is a topic that a few people have ...

Ok, not so much _in_ Adelaide as, umm... well... Ok, he's going to be presenting a session remotely, about corruption in Microsoft. Or at least, the way that Microsoft handles corruption in SQL Server. Paul Randal must be corrupt himself, because he's Kimberly Tripp's other half. So if you're going to be in Adelaide on Jun 14th, ...

It's great when a new quarter starts, because we get to find out who the new MVPs are. This time, my good friend Peter Ward has received the gong in the SQL world, and in the Dev world, friends Grant Holliday and Paul Stovell (both from Readify) have been honoured. Great news guys - thoroughly deserved. They all found out on their way back from ...

Paul Turner is an Adelaide guy I know well. He's been a trainer at Kaz for quite a while, is on the local ACS executive committee with me and has been involved in the local .Net user-group too. He's had a couple of major lifestyle changes in the last couple of weeks. Most significantly, he's become a father, but also he's become a Readifarian (and ...

Last week I presented at my user-group about PowerShell and why every DBA should know this. The talk went for just over an hour, and as most of the audience hadn't used PowerShell at all, I started from the top and really pushed concepts like ''You pipe objects not text''. The script can be downloaded from here. So then by the time I got around ...