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Accessibility in your PowerPoint slide deck
This post is part of the series I kicked off here. You can read my post about captions here. Let’s talk about slides! Many of us are familiar with producing slide decks for talks and conference sessions using PowerPoint (or Keynote or whatever the Google one is called this week), but just how much thought
-> Continue reading Accessibility in your PowerPoint slide deck
Join me at the EightKB virtual conference on 28 July 2021
Next week on Wednesday 28 July 2021, I will be presenting a brand-new session titled “How SQL Server stores that data type” for the free EightKB virtual conference. I’ve made it a 500-level talk, as reading hex and binary for fun requires a bit of mental arithmetic. Bob Ward, famous for his half-day brain-melting sessions
-> Continue reading Join me at the EightKB virtual conference on 28 July 2021
Accessibility after the fact: closed captions for videos
My user group, the Calgary Data User Group, has been recording videos since April of this year, so at the time of this writing we have just two videos on our YouTube channel. As one of the Azure Data Tech Groups we have access to Microsoft Teams, and in there we can display live captions during
-> Continue reading Accessibility after the fact: closed captions for videos
On accessibility in our community
Today I want to write about the community that brought us all together. The community that got this very website on your radar. The community that got many of us spending lunch breaks, evenings and weekends learning about the Microsoft Data Platform at free local events. This community has had various organizations steering its direction
-> Continue reading On accessibility in our community
T-SQL Tuesday Retrospective #015: Aggregations
In early 2011 Jes Borland invited us to write about aggregations: I want to hear how you solved business problems with aggregate functions. I want to see your cool T-SQL tricks. How are aggregates used in SSRS, SSAS, or SSIS? What have you learned about aggregate functions? Ten years of hindsight (and being able to
-> Continue reading T-SQL Tuesday Retrospective #015: Aggregations
A summary of new features in Azure SQL Database
It has been some time since I last wrote about Azure SQL Database. Although it has been more than three years since SQL Server 2017 was released, Microsoft have not been resting on their laurels. Here is a list of features in public preview that you can start testing and including in your future plans
-> Continue reading A summary of new features in Azure SQL Database
How SQL Server stores data types: DATETIMEOFFSET
If you’d like to check out the previous instalment in this series on storing dates and times, click here. I avoided mentioning this data type because I didn’t think a lot of people used it, and then my co-author William Assaf (blog | Twitter) told me on Twitter that he uses it, so here we
-> Continue reading How SQL Server stores data types: DATETIMEOFFSET
Things to check when restoring a database
Whenever I restore a database — especially one I obtained outside of my regular environment (for example a customer database, a development database, or even a sample database like WideWorldImporters) — there are a few things I like to check to make sure it’s configured for peak performance. Note that some of this advice may
-> Continue reading Things to check when restoring a database
The curse of the blank page
Last week I wrote about recovering data after an unplanned outage, and this week I’m contemplating a thing that would be considered bad in those circumstances as well as in the context of writing: a blank page. I’m feeling the psychic weight of the pandemic, despite having had a vaccination. After writing a blog post
-> Continue reading The curse of the blank page
How I tackle disaster recovery
One of my special interests as an autistic person is understanding mechanical components of a computer, both analog and digital. In the olden days, we had devices known as hard drives which used one or more spinning disks and a read/write head that would move over the surface with a buffer of air so thin
-> Continue reading How I tackle disaster recovery