I loved my freshman year high school Spanish class. I would have done okay had I been left to my own devices, but by luck, I had two of my best friends sitting on either side of me in that class, and we developed a friendly rivalry over our grades in the class. Competition pushed us to excellence far better than any of us could have pushed ourselves alone. Microsoft has capitalized on that desire to compete in a perennial competition called the Scripting Games. Competitors have a week to submit a solution to the challenge, posting it to www​.PoshCode​.org, which hosts the competition again this year. Each entry is then evaluated by a panel of judges. Prizes are awarded for the top-scoring scripters in a beginner and advanced division, and additional prizes are awarded randomly to participants, with an increased chance of winning as you participate in greater numbers of challenge events.

Here’s the secret — the most important thing to know about SQL Server (in my opinion) is indexing. In transaction processing systems (also known as OLTP databases), database activity involves several statements. These include insert, update, delete, and select. There is a competing need between the modification statements (insert, update, and delete) and reading the data (select). Since the database has both — what should we do?

Demand for skilled professionals is strong in many areas of IT as companies seek to address new demands, such as the growing use of cloud computing and mobile devices, while keeping hardware and software systems up-to-date.

Companies seek professionals who have hands-on experience with new and evolving technologies such as Windows 7, cloud computing, .NET 4.0, VMware and mobile application development.

Requirements for certain IT positions vary across industries and regions, but firms are seeking the following types of candidates:

Microsoft just released the second CTP (that’s Community Technology Previews) of the forthcoming PowerShell 3.0. The version that comes on your Windows 7 clients and your Windows Server 2008 R2 servers is the 2.0 release, so Microsoft is giving the PowerShell community an opportunity to kick the tires on the new version before it goes prime-time. There are some great new features in there, but some of them make me worry that I may soon need to turn in a job application at AAA A1 Taxi Company.

I love it when I can make simple fixes in the database that yield great results. Here are a few T-SQL tips that gave me great gain over the years. You have two goals with any database — storage and retrieval. Optimize both with these tips.

Let’s review what we’ve seen about PowerShell pipeline behavior before we get to the grand finale of this extended discussion.

Among other things my town is full of non-Starbucks coffee shops with great coffee, free Wi-Fi, and a lot of college students, telecommuters, or weekend warriors (including myself) who consume both in large quantities.

Security in public Wi-Fi settings is not to be taken lightly. It’s way too easily hacked since most business owners don’t know the difference between WEP and WPA, and a vast majority of networks are not password restricted. That’s why when I went to a new coffee shop I was surprised to see about ten shared computers pop up on my network.

I love being organized mostly because it’s the only way I can function effectively. As a Microsoft instructor and database consultant, it truly is interesting to see all the new features from one release to the next. However, I find it extremely challenging to remember which version introduced each feature as I work with clients.

However, I also find it extremely challenging to remember which version introduced each feature as I work with clients. Database Administrators and Developers are tasked with making applications and upgrades work efficiently, and they must be able to integrate applications across versions. This matters because most companies cannot suddenly upgrade all of their servers and applications at once, so there is this type of mish-mash blend of versions.

Relational databases are important not only because of the information they store but, more importantly, for the data we retrieve from them. The select statement allows us to ask the database a question. It’s the way we retrieve information from the database system.

As you look at the help file for your favorite cmdlets, you’ll notice (if you’re using –full) that many of the parameters of those cmdlets provide support for pipeline input. Most of them, though, don’t accept pipeline input “ByValue” – they accept it “ByPropertyName”. This means that when an object is passed to this cmdlet on the pipeline, a “ByPropertyName” parameter of the cmdlet watches that incoming object to see if the object has a property with the exact same name as that parameter. If there’s an exact match, the value of that object’s property is applied to that parameter. Hoo, boy. Example time.