Nigel Sammy

T-SQL Tuesday #22: Have you seen PowerPivot for Excel?

Nigel Peter Sammy Tuesday, September 13, 2011 T-SQL Tuesday No comments

"Wow it's T-SQL Tuesday already!" was the thought I had when I saw this month's T-SQL invitation yesterday. This month the blog party is being hosted by Robert Pearl and the topic he has chosen is 'Data Presentation'.

Initially I thought about not submitting a post this month because I wouldn’t have enough time to do a post with examples or tip and tricks. However as I thought about it more I realised that this is a good opportunity to highlight a product that has been very helpful to me: PowerPivot for Excel.

Continue Reading →

Free SQL Server Training in September!

Nigel Peter Sammy Sunday, August 28, 2011 PASS No comments

PASS is once again giving free SQL Server training '24 hours' style. That’s right, another 24 hours of PASS (24 HOP) event will be happening in September and since the PASS Summit is right around the corner they decided to go with the theme 'Summit Preview'. All the sessions would be done by world-renowned SQL Server and BI experts who are presenting at the PASS Summit 2011 in order to give you a free preview of the type of sessions you can expect at this year’s event.

Never been to a 24 hours of PASS event before? Not sure what you have to do to attend? Just go to the homepage and register! Don't miss the 24 free technical webcasts occurring on two days - 12 on September 7th and the other 12 on September 8th.

Continue Reading →

TTSSUG Event Review: Demonstrating T-SQL Constructs

Nigel Peter Sammy Friday, August 26, 2011 T-SQL, TTSSUG No comments

Our meeting on Tuesday did not have as many people as we hoped but the presentation done by Mitra Sinanan was very informative to the few that attended. He created some scripts to highlight the difference between some T-SQL constructs and explained when would be the best situations to use them. He also spoke about one of the command line utilities that came with SQL Server 2005 - the TableDiff Utility.

Continue Reading →

T-SQL Tuesday #21: Too Much Of A Good Thing Can Sometimes Be Bad

Nigel Peter Sammy Wednesday, August 10, 2011 PD, T-SQL Tuesday 2 comments

This is the first time that I am taking part in a T-SQL Tuesday event but it seems that Adam knew I was going to take part so he did something special to celebrate my post and made it a T-SQL Wednesday event this month (the real reason is explained in his blog post).

Continue Reading →

Help Wanted: NoSQL Information Required!

Nigel Peter Sammy Sunday, July 31, 2011 NoSQL 2 comments

Earlier today, a developer contacted me to get some information about SQL Server since he is trying to decide which DBMS to use for his project. Our conversation eventually moved away from SQL Server and brought us to the 'Relational vs. Non-Relational' discussion and of course 'NoSQL' was there waiting to be called next.

During that conversation I realised what little knowledge I had of NoSQL and not understanding both sides of the story made it difficult to give advice without seeming one sided. After the discussion I decided to go do some reading on it and thought it would be a good idea to blog about it as well. However with the number of things that I have to do I would probably take forever to get a blog post like that published.

Continue Reading →

TTSSUG Event: Deploying and Managing Applications on Azure

Nigel Peter Sammy Monday, July 18, 2011 SQL Azure, TTSSUG No comments

Our presenter for this event, Hasani Holder, is a Teleios MessageCentral Software Engineer who has been using Azure since last year September. If you have no knowledge of Azure then this event will help you understand what Azure is and how to use it.

Continue Reading →