The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated…

Despite several rumors, I've neither died nor taken a Kramer-style vow of silence.

Seinfeld_s9e13

On the contrary, I've been beavering away on the final stages of getting my book out the door. The typeset process is almost complete, and the book will be sent to the printers in the next week or so. Many thanks to all involved in this process, in particular Kevin Kline who has very kindly and enthusiastically agreed to write the forward.

This brings to a close a massive 18 months during which time the rest of my life has been continuing along at full speed. Apart from having more time for my family, I'm looking forward to returning to blogging and maintaining SQLCrunch.

The other piece of news to emerge in recent weeks has been the acceptance of my abstract for the SQLPass summit in November. Considering the amazing quality of speakers this event attracts, this came as a genuine surprise, so one of the things i'll be doing in the next 4 months or so will be preparing for that, part of which will involve presenting at a number of SQL Server user groups around Australia.

My abstract is titled "DBAs Behaving Badly... Worst Practices for Database Administrators". Here's an overview;

There's a vast number of freely available best practices for SQL Server administration, however, depending on the environment, a lot of them may not be applicable or even appropriate. In contrast, worst practices are universally acknowledged by most SQL Server professionals as situations to avoid at all costs.

In this session, we'll cover ten categories of classic DBA mistakes and investigate real world examples of how these practices often end in disaster. We'll also cover tools and techniques that can be used in avoiding these situations, with an emphasis on the new features introduced in SQL Server 2008.


So, with that in mind, I look forward to seeing (and buying beer for) many of you in Seattle this November!

Cheers,
Rod.