I’ve begun working on developing a couple of small habits this month, thanks largely to Andy Mallon‘s helpful advocacy. Becoming more consistent in sharing my pronouns My pronouns are “she/her.” I only became aware of why it’s helpful to share your pronouns in the last year. Before that, I hadn’t given much thought to it. Andy gives a great explanation of why this is helpful if this is something you are comfortable sharing — here is one quote: For some folks, the obvious pronouns aren’t their preferred pronouns. You share your pronouns to help normalize it so that everyone feels more comfortable sharing pronouns.Andy Mallon in Hi, I’m Andy. My pronouns are he/him. A biography slide showing pronouns along with contact info I’ve started to edit my various biographies online to include my preferred pronouns. I plan to request that conference organizers include an optional space for pronouns in their…

I’m excited to begin moving over courses from SQL Workbooks and making the material available here. The first course up for grabs is The Dirty Secrets of NOLOCK. A little bit about the course What happens when you use NOLOCK hints in your code, or set your isolation level to READ UNCOMMITTED in SQL Server? In 50 minutes of online videos, you will learn what NOLOCK means, why NOLOCK can return incorrect results (and other problems), what allocation order scans are (and how to get them), and other risks and options for reading uncommitted data. Course lessons include: What is NOLOCK? (3 minutes)The dirtiest secret: NOLOCK returns garbage data (10 minutes)The fast alternative to NOLOCK: indexing (5 minutes)Why NOLOCK is a misnomer (7 minutes)Bad phenomena that can occur under NOLOCK (2 minutes)Uses for NOLOCK: admin queries and garbage data (5 minutes)Allocation order scans (13 minutes)A common error with NOLOCK (6…

Thanks to the support of Redgate, I’ve launched a new course which teaches you the basics of TSQL. The course is totally free, no logins required — we don’t even ask for the email address. Check out the course on Redgate University The course is here: https://www.red-gate.com/hub/university/courses/t-sql/tsql-for-beginners Each week has an embedded video for the course, along with a link to the syllabus and scripts. The videos also have a timeline in case you wish to jump to a particular part of the discussion. Want to join live? I’m publishing a new module each week, and we have five weeks to go. There’s a calendar reminder in the course if you want to join me live on Wednesdays at 3 pm BST / 11 AM EST, or you can catch the videos each week and follow along. Want to learn Query Tuning, Reporting Services, or PowerBI? Redgate’s Community Circle initiative…