PASS is the Professional Association for SQL Server & Business Intelligence.
If the organisations name had kept pace with their contribution to the strategic direction of MS SQL Server since its inception, then it may well have changed its name to PassBI. However, you can probably see the negative side of this :-)
It may have been more appropriate to call it Advanced Contribution Through Individual Voluntary Endeavour as PASS, thus making it ActivePass. However, it is often difficult to change something after the event and sometimes it is better to leave a great thing alone rather than tempt breaking what it contributes towards. Such synergistic contribution can affect the outcome of strategic changes negatively, and Vice-versa.
In their usual understated fashion, the great bunch of people that make up PASS, have made available, with the help of Maximum ASP and Dell, access to a free copy of SQL Server 2008, with associated learning materials at http://www.sqlserverbeta.com/. I would get there quickly because all of this is a new idea and resources will run out sooner or later.
Access to the Free SQL Server 2008 Beta includes a FREE PASS membership.
FREE PASS membership* includes:
· Subscription to the PASS eNewsletter
· Access to SQL Server Community programs
· Access to national and regional events
· Access to expert-user book reviews, technical webinars & podcasts.
It is all a bit like a Möbius strip. I have never properly understood why you can keep drawing the line without coming to the end of the paper! I guess it is similar to synergy, you don't know how it happens but it is a nice pleasant surprise when you see the outcome.
I hope you enjoy the site if you get to it on time. If not then keep trying, it is human nature for everyone to want something but only some to put something back. The site is being controlled so that if a resource lays dormant it will be made available to others who can use it better, no sweat on either party. How nice is that!
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
You don't need money to be a member of the Mojo Pac
You may remember an article I put up in the blog earlier this year about a product called MojoPac. A piece of virtualisation software for taking your PC with you on an external storage device, like a PDA for example. Well now you can get a free version for free, how good is that. www.MojoPac.com
Monday, October 08, 2007
A Tiny effort can save a lot of time and Windows 2008 shows a lot of effort has been expended
The nice thing about working for a training company is that one sometimes comes across snippets of information that communicate a way of making management of techno-logical speak easier.
An example of this occurred this morning when someone cared enough to point out to someone that there is a way of reducing the amount of text you have to type in to allow someone to follow your path.
I am not sure whether the sender of the original message got the message but that is another story.
If you go to www.tinyurl.com you can enter the text that you would normally type in, in the address bar, and press a button to convert it into a smaller link that you can give to people. The site will retain the original and provide a conversion for the recipient.
I didn't have time to check if you could pass parameters, but you can do that investigation yourself from here!
Thanks Steve, and thanks Paul for the original link which is all about the distinctly new features of Windows 2008, now accessible at www.Tinyurl.com/242nek
An example of this occurred this morning when someone cared enough to point out to someone that there is a way of reducing the amount of text you have to type in to allow someone to follow your path.
I am not sure whether the sender of the original message got the message but that is another story.
If you go to www.tinyurl.com you can enter the text that you would normally type in, in the address bar, and press a button to convert it into a smaller link that you can give to people. The site will retain the original and provide a conversion for the recipient.
I didn't have time to check if you could pass parameters, but you can do that investigation yourself from here!
Thanks Steve, and thanks Paul for the original link which is all about the distinctly new features of Windows 2008, now accessible at www.Tinyurl.com/242nek
Monday, October 01, 2007
The Big Picture of how XML standards fit together
There is a nice guy called Ken Sall who spent some considerable time putting together a graphic with links in that will be useful to many of you.
Especially if you come to meet XML for the first time through your exposure to SQL Server.
It links with the standards organisation pages that explain all the relevant standards and the graphic shows how they fit together.
I always find a big picture works wonders to help you get started!
Especially if you come to meet XML for the first time through your exposure to SQL Server.
It links with the standards organisation pages that explain all the relevant standards and the graphic shows how they fit together.
I always find a big picture works wonders to help you get started!
Friday, September 21, 2007
Heroes and Villains
It can be all too easy to see the world through dark glasses, especially when you have to deal with large companies that fragment themselves to try to inject energy into their being.
This method of breaking things up usually works in nature because something fills the gaps to prevent a vacuum. It is the controlled movement that creates new structures. The control in nature comes from fluids.
However, in business the gaps that are left are often not filled with anything and the individual elements separate and create self contained units that no longer have a connection between constituent parts of the original organism.
What is more, the vacuum is often filled with, 'not my problem gov, try somewhere else'.
It is so refreshing to come across people who fill this vacuum with real human extensions to badly designed systems rather than excuses for not being able to achieve what the customer needs.
I applaud two such heroes who have gone beyond 'standard' practice to make my life easier, after it had been made miserable by many others in the same organisations.
The first works for AXA Health insurance. Robin Masters is an individual you can trust to fix an issue rather than to pass the buck.
The second is from BT. Graeme Paterson, regained my confidence in British Telecom which has been dwindling based on my attempt to get a good service from them over the last few years.
These people obviously represent many other helpful individuals in these companies. However, the probability is that you are more likely to meet people that do the hours without putting their heart into the job.
But then who is the villain? The person who has no heart in their job or the person that gives people heartless tasks to perform by developing vacuous systems?
This method of breaking things up usually works in nature because something fills the gaps to prevent a vacuum. It is the controlled movement that creates new structures. The control in nature comes from fluids.
However, in business the gaps that are left are often not filled with anything and the individual elements separate and create self contained units that no longer have a connection between constituent parts of the original organism.
What is more, the vacuum is often filled with, 'not my problem gov, try somewhere else'.
It is so refreshing to come across people who fill this vacuum with real human extensions to badly designed systems rather than excuses for not being able to achieve what the customer needs.
I applaud two such heroes who have gone beyond 'standard' practice to make my life easier, after it had been made miserable by many others in the same organisations.
The first works for AXA Health insurance. Robin Masters is an individual you can trust to fix an issue rather than to pass the buck.
The second is from BT. Graeme Paterson, regained my confidence in British Telecom which has been dwindling based on my attempt to get a good service from them over the last few years.
These people obviously represent many other helpful individuals in these companies. However, the probability is that you are more likely to meet people that do the hours without putting their heart into the job.
But then who is the villain? The person who has no heart in their job or the person that gives people heartless tasks to perform by developing vacuous systems?
Monday, September 03, 2007
The best debugging occurs at the common (Human) language interface
NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming is a strange thing for an IT person to be interested in wouldn't you think?
We all know that we should base all requirements on use cases which are stated in simple english. However, what is simple english? Who wrote the use cases? What did the business person state as the requirement and what else were they thinking at the time besides what they communicated by voice. How was the statement perceived and recorded by the analysit, did they rely only on words or other non verbal activity on and around the business person that should not have been considered in the way that it was?
Elicitation and recording of facts is impacted on by feelings which can change the meaning of words by overloading them with extraneuos data that should have been contained in isolation from the current object of communication.
Take a look at http://www.nlpls.com/articles/metamodel/MetaModelFlashcards.php.
Then go to http://www.nlpls.com/articles/NLPmetaModel.php and learn about Meta Models and the people that have discovered and documented them.
We all know that we should base all requirements on use cases which are stated in simple english. However, what is simple english? Who wrote the use cases? What did the business person state as the requirement and what else were they thinking at the time besides what they communicated by voice. How was the statement perceived and recorded by the analysit, did they rely only on words or other non verbal activity on and around the business person that should not have been considered in the way that it was?
Elicitation and recording of facts is impacted on by feelings which can change the meaning of words by overloading them with extraneuos data that should have been contained in isolation from the current object of communication.
Take a look at http://www.nlpls.com/articles/metamodel/MetaModelFlashcards.php.
Then go to http://www.nlpls.com/articles/NLPmetaModel.php and learn about Meta Models and the people that have discovered and documented them.
Friday, August 24, 2007
Best practice to make perfect
One of the things that all of us lack to some extent or other is real world experience in something or other. The main reason for this is that the real world this year is not the same as the real world last year or the year before.
There is only one entity that can be all things to all, and to my knowledge that entity doesn't participate directly in IT projects. Therefore, a pragmatic approach to this requirement for the rest of us can be to use the real world experience of others. Which is why history is so valuable lest we continue to make the same mistakes again and again.
In the IT world our history is encapsulated in successful organisations like OpenSource, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, etc , alongside standards bodies and the standards these organisations contribute towards like ANSII, Prince, ITIL, OMG, UML (See Standards_organizations).
These are the result of many 'real world experiences' being shared to make a common unified real world for all to share and work in, also known as teamwork!
These then lead to validated software and documentation packages that can be used as business (functional - Sales, Finance, Production, Distribution, PerformancePoint Server, etc) and technical (Non Functional - RDBMS's, Object Orientation, The Web, Operating Systems etc) needs solution implementors.
However, we can throw all this away if we do not follow the best practices that are revealed by such historic teamwork.
Therefore, to put a check on deviation from standards we can implement testing. However, as we know it takes as much as three times as long to fix things as to do them properly in the first place. Also, the testing can get a bit tainted by politics.
Therefore, thanks go to MS for their 'MS SQL Server real world experience' gap filler :-
SQL Server Best Practices
Get the real-world guidelines, expert tips, and rock-solid guidance to take your SQL Server implementation to the next level. These SQL Server best practices draw on the extensive experience and expertise from respected developers and engineers at Microsoft, who walk you through the specifics on solving particularly difficult issues.
Ref: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/bb331794.aspx
There is only one entity that can be all things to all, and to my knowledge that entity doesn't participate directly in IT projects. Therefore, a pragmatic approach to this requirement for the rest of us can be to use the real world experience of others. Which is why history is so valuable lest we continue to make the same mistakes again and again.
In the IT world our history is encapsulated in successful organisations like OpenSource, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, etc , alongside standards bodies and the standards these organisations contribute towards like ANSII, Prince, ITIL, OMG, UML (See Standards_organizations).
These are the result of many 'real world experiences' being shared to make a common unified real world for all to share and work in, also known as teamwork!
These then lead to validated software and documentation packages that can be used as business (functional - Sales, Finance, Production, Distribution, PerformancePoint Server, etc) and technical (Non Functional - RDBMS's, Object Orientation, The Web, Operating Systems etc) needs solution implementors.
However, we can throw all this away if we do not follow the best practices that are revealed by such historic teamwork.
Therefore, to put a check on deviation from standards we can implement testing. However, as we know it takes as much as three times as long to fix things as to do them properly in the first place. Also, the testing can get a bit tainted by politics.
Therefore, thanks go to MS for their 'MS SQL Server real world experience' gap filler :-
SQL Server Best Practices
Get the real-world guidelines, expert tips, and rock-solid guidance to take your SQL Server implementation to the next level. These SQL Server best practices draw on the extensive experience and expertise from respected developers and engineers at Microsoft, who walk you through the specifics on solving particularly difficult issues.
Ref: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/bb331794.aspx