Ken Henderson's WebLog

(Or, How to Beat Its Longest Level, The Covenant, in 20 Minutes and Get the Full 3x Time Bonus) (Or, What I Did On the Day after Christmas) (Or, How to Set a New World Record for Speed Play in Halo 3) Over the recent holiday break I decided to...

I was in Redmond last week on business and had a lot of fun this time around. The trip began and ended with a visit to Key Arena in downtown Seattle. Monday night it was the Van Halen concert. I’d already seen Van Halen in Kansas City back in October...

In case you missed it in my last post, SQL Nexus , the SQL Server performance analysis platform built by Bart and me, has been released via CodePlex . Here's a post post where I talked about how Nexus works. And here's the link to its page on the CodePlex...

Have you ever needed to find your most expensive queries and quickly grew weary of writing T-SQL against trace tables to try to ferret them out? Have you ever had to wade through gigabytes of trace data just to find one ill-behaving query? Have you ever...

I had a great time on my brief stint in Denver for the PASS Summit . We had a good session and a good crowd, and Kevin Kline did a marvelous job of running the whole thing. He had lots of great questions for me during the interview, and the crowd had...

I'm being interviewed on stage Friday afternoon from 2:30-3:45 by PASS president Kevin Kline (current session title is "SQL Server Q&A," but I think they'll be changing it). Topics we'll cover will include my background, where SQL Server is headed...

...and in honor of it, I'm going to be especially cryptic and give you a little word puzzle--an anagram: Catch Meek The solution I have in mind for this one pretty much sums up how I feel about today. It's a great day :-) A hint for those watching at...

I'm starting a little series here featuring interviews with industry luminaries. I figured people might like to hear what they have to say. My first subject is Joe Celko. Q1: Tell us a little about yourself, in case somebody does not know you. A1...

This came up yesterday with one of our support engineers, so I thought I’d post a brief entry on it. On SQL Server 2005, using ALTER INDEX…REBUILD to rebuild a clustered index does not rebuild its nonclustered indexes by default. If you think about it...

Many have noted that there are some files missing from the CD accompanying my latest book, SQL Server 2005 Practical Troubleshooting . My apologies for that. We’ve just posted an update to the book’s CD at http://www.khen.com/sspt.htm . Note: you’re welcome...

For those wondering why I use the terms 'khen' and 'foo' so often, here's an article on the etymology of both: http://www.youcancallmeal.com/type/archives/2006/03/origin_of_the_t.php

I've mentioned before that I had a new book coming out. It's finally available on Amazon. Again, I didn't write this one; I was just its editor. It was written by a "dream team" of developers from the SQL Server dev team and support engineers from Microsoft...

My friends in Microsoft’s Product Support Services (PSS) group (aka SQL Server Support) are speaking again this year at the PASS Community Summit . They’re doing some main conference sessions, the PSS Boot camp, and putting on the PSS Service Center again...

A conversation with a friend over email got me to thinking that this info might be useful to a few of you. It’s common for SQL Server application developers to want to “normalize” the query text returned in a Profiler trace such that executions of...

I mentioned in my last post here that we have a new book coming out in December that focuses on troubleshooting issues with broken SQL Servers. We've decided to release a sample chapter from the book (that has not yet been proofread) so that people can...

Dow Jones' Denis Gobo interviewed me recently about the new book some colleagues and I have got coming out. You can find the interview here . For those who don't know, I am the editor for a new book coming out in December entitled SQL Server 2005 Practical...

For anyone who cares and is not already subscribed to my MSN Spaces blog , DNS issues with my Μοviεβrainia movie review site have been resolved, and it's back online. Check it out at http://blogs.moviebrainia.com/mr . Feel free to post any comments you...

I'm starting a new movie review blog because I wanted to get familiar with Community Server and because I thought my movie reviews really ought to be on their own site rather than clogging up my MSN Spaces blog site . They tend to be much longer than...

For those who don't have this yet, it looks like Joe is blogging: http://joecelkothesqlapprentice.blogspot.com/ Joe swears this isn't him, but I'm skeptical... Among other things, the blog features lots of pictures of Joe. I'm still waiting for...

My friend Bart Duncan is now blogging. Bart is one of the top SQL Server performance experts in the world. You can find his new blog here on MSDN at http://blogs.msdn.com/bartd .

I've decided to move all religion-related posts to their own blog over on Blogger. From now on, anything of a religious nature will be posted there rather than on my MSN Spaces blog . Search for my name over there and you should find my new blog .

http://www.calcsea.org/20051218-nytimes.asp The guy in this story is Ethan Berman, my boss when I was with The RiskMetrics Group . Sounds just like him.

I used to use a little PC piano program called PianoMan written by Neil Rubenking of PC Magazine fame. I contacted Neil about an update recently, and he tells me that there isn't and won't be one. The main reason is that he wrote the software based on...

I'm in Barcelona for the PASS Europe Conference . It's been a good conference once again, and we've had a great week. My MS colleagues and I put on our SQL Server Boot Camp again and came away thinking that it was our best one yet. We had sessions in...

I'm speaking at the 2006 PASS European Conference in Barcelona. Drop by if you're attending. Hope to see you there.