Accessibility is not just about slides
Although I don’t write about it much on this website, I am on the autism spectrum, and I have ADHD. I need to sit at the front of a room because it helps me see…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
A quick primer on binary and hexadecimal
A few years ago, I wrote that a CPU is “a hot mess of on-off switches.” There’s more to it than that when you get into the weeds of caches and cores and logic gates,…
T-SQL Tuesday Retrospective #015: Automation
In February 2011, Pat Wright invited us to talk about Automation: So the topic I have chosen for this month is Automation! It can be Automation with T-SQL or with Powershell or a mix of…
T-SQL Tuesday Retrospective #014: Resolutions
At the end of 2010, Sean McCown (blog | Twitter) invited us to talk about resolutions: Things like getting certified, or perfecting a process, or taking management classes, etc are all things that are commonly…
Ambling through undocumented DBCC commands may result in boredom
There comes a time when we heed a certain call. The call is to avoid dangerous undocumented DBCC commands in SQL Server, especially those that bypass built-in protections. I’m looking directly at you DBCC WRITEPAGE. Besides,…