I recently wrapped up watching Riak Fundamentals, a course on Riak that Adron Hall put together in 2013. I'd like to see more Riak content on Pluralsight, as this course wasn't quite what I'd hoped. I went into it hoping for a course which would give an intro to developing a simple Riak solution. Instead, this…
Where’s the Penguatroll?
You may be asking yourself, "Where's that handsome gentleman who provided great content and has not at all been slacking with the content, not even a little?" I've undergone a rebranding in connection with my campaign to, one day, become a YouTube sensation with ALL THE VIEWERS AND SUBSCRIBERS. If you want to help me…
Game design and Uplink [A partial review you can use [TM] ]
In the Steam Summer sale, I picked up an upgrade for Prison Architect that also got me the entire back catalog of Introversion. One of those games was Uplink. Uplink is a hacking game; it's somewhat similar to Hacknet, which is much newer and text based (and in my opinion, the better game), but there's…
So long, Barkevious
I am an acknowledged fan of Barkevious Mingo, both in Madden and in real life. However, apart from his ridiculously awesome name, he produced surprisingly little on the field. He is now a New England Patriot for the price of a fifth round pick. The Patriots think he can contribute on special teams and/or act…
TIL: Slack + SQL Server
No, I don't mean the SQL Server community on Slack---although you should definitely join up there. I have a client whose primary method of communication is Slack. They have e-mail accounts, but hardly use them. They also have no real monitoring solution in place, so I wanted to be able to do some quick checks and,…
Pluralsight Reviews: R Data Visualization
Beginning Data Visualization with R is Matthew Renze's second course on R for Pluralsight, and it follows from the first on exploratory data analysis (review here). In this second course, Matthew takes a look at univariate and bivariate data visualization. The flow of the course is similar to the first course: Matthew's examples are based around…
The Marginal DBA
You Have A Performance Problem; What Do You Do? Brent Ozar had a blog post about what hardware you can purchase with the price of two cores of Enterprise Edition and argues that you should probably spend some more money on hardware. Gianluca Sartori has a blog post along similar lines. By contrast, Andre Kamman had an entire…
dotNetConf.local Raleigh
On September 10th, we are hosting a local dotNetConf in Raleigh. Registration is free and is handled through Meetup. We have a limited number of seats available, so be sure to get in before the list fills up!
August Presentations
This is going to be a big month for me, presentation-wise. After taking a couple of weeks off from presenting, I've got a jam-packed month. Here are the events, in order: On Saturday, August 6th, I will present at SQL Saturday Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky. I'll give my talk on integrating SQL Server with Hadoop.…
TIL: RetainSameConnection
I recently had to debug a co-worker's SSIS package, trying to figure out why it wasn't working quite right. We have a sharded infrastructure, meaning that our customers' data is split out among a number of servers with equivalent schemas. For this particular package, we wanted to, for each customer, get the relevant data from…
36 Chambers - The Legendary Journeys: Execution to the max! 