August 20th was my last day at Sears Holdings. I once heard somewhere the average person my age spends three years at a job before leaving and move on. Well I sent 12 years there of course I held four different roles there during that time. I decided to leave Sears Holdings because the opportunity presented to me to join Coyote Logistics and learn & develop new systems was too great to pass up. Of course I’m still writing SSIS packages, Using SQL day in and day out but I’m automating things and developing new processes on a whole new level using the greatest and latest tools on the market. Who is Coyote Logistics and what they do? Well Coyote Logistic is a 3^rd party logistics service provider based out of Chicago they specialize in moving customer shipments in the most efficient manner for their customers, their drivers, and the environment. So with lots of cargo moving around the world all the time, there is a lot of data for me to work with, simplify, and share with my coworkers and our customers.

Every wonder why some people have amazing looking Facebook profiles or 1000s of followers? In this 30 minute session we will discuss how to use facebook, google+, twitter the simple and easy way to communicate with your friends, family, and followers. This course is led me Richard Lewis a veteran user of social media sites and Chairman of the US Jaycees National Technology Advisory Committee. Come out next month on August 7^th at 7:00PM. You can RSVP on the Wheeling Jaycees Meetup site .

So I’m about a month late or maybe three in writing my recap on the event so here goes. It was awesomeness !!!! 2012 marked my second SQL Saturday that I’ve attended and have to say it just keeps getting better. This year I was able to volunteer with registration which is an awesome way to meet all the attendees well at least most of them. Also I hooped into five awesome sessions “A Complete BI Solution in About an Hour!” With Arron King, SRS Report Builder for Business Intelligence with David Eichner, Kama Sutra of SSIS: A guide to loving ETL with Bill Fellows, and The Script Task, powerhouse of SSIS with Norman Kelm, and Join Us! Getting Started as a Technical Speaker with Eddie Wuerch cause I would love to start speaking at SQL events outside of work. Biggest take a way’s from this year event was networking with others in the profession and the knowledge I picked up from all the sessions. I’m already looking forward to the 2013 event.

Another #Meme 15 topic brought you by MVP Jason Strate (Blog | twitter). This month topic “What are ten blogs that you think other SQL Server professionals should be following but might not be?” Coming up with a list of just 10 is harder than I thought narrowing it down to ten is just way to hard but i was able to do. The list I  put together covers everyone from the newbie to SQL to the all-round DBA.

Introduction

I downloaded Windows 8 when it was released to Developers back last year and installed it on a virtual workstation with a 2 gigs of ram running from my Windows Home Server. I thought it was shaky and slow. So I decided to abandon it. Until recently when the Consumer Preview release came out and I decided to give it another try. Getting windows 8 up running was actually quite simple. Downloaded the Consumer release preview and burned the ISO to a DVD was all that was required. Besides an operating system key of course. I decided to install windows 8 my primary laptop Toshiba T205 Satellite laptop so that I can get a full experience by using it day in and day out. Just a few specs on my laptop has 160gb hard drive 2gb of ram and is running a Intel Dual Core Pentium 1.6ghz processor so nothing fancy and no touch screen. But this being a five year old computer I expected for the operating system to sluggish.

A business partner approached me the other day looking to share information with my company. Since parts numbers are recycled more often than lame jokes in my business one of the things we needed the business partner to provide was the brand of the part. The business partner said that this would be difficult to do since they were unfamiliar with linking data across tables in any manner. After understanding a little about the setup of the partner’s tables I taught them to design a view linking the two primary tables where the data could be seen together through a view. Since their tables where normalized all they needed was an INNER JOIN statement to make this happen. Below is a sample of the statement i wrote for the partner.