Amazon Prime Air - yup, this is happening....maybe

90 Days to MCSA - week 6

Well here we are in "week 6" and the time has been flying...being so busy with fully renovating a house (dedicateddiy.blogspot.com) I have neglected my 90 Days To MCSA prep, but no more!
Tonight I will be asking about certifications at the New England SQL Server Users Group meetup and see who has some advice for me, and then I think I need to just book the first test to jolt myself into action.

Checking out the dates and locations near me on Prometrics site I see there are plenty of test dates right nearby, so I have no excuse there. Has anyone else stalled out, or are you all charging ahead ? How is it going ? A walk across the MIT campus is always inspiring, I'll make sure to do that again after the meetup.

From last month:

PASS TV YouTube channel - all sessions available

Now that PASS 2013 is over, head to the PASS TV YouTube channel to watch the sessions, I have embedded my favorite so far, parallel query plans with Paul White (@SQL_Kiwi)

90 Days to MCSA - Week 2 - New functions for 2012

In studying for the Querying Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (70-461) exam I am trying out a couple new items, below are a few that are mentioned in a few different training programs, probably good to know these.

-- NEW FOR 2012
-- IIF(<boolean expr>, <value if true>, <value if false>)
   SELECT IIF(1 = 1, 'True Value', 'False Value')
-- TRY_CONVERT(<expr>, <datatype>, <style>)
   SELECT TRY_CONVERT(DATETIME, '1/1/12330', 101)
-- TRY_PARSE(<string val> AS <datatype> USING <culture>)
   SELECT TRY_PARSE('String' AS INT USING 'cy')
-- OFFSET...FETCH 
   SELECT name
       FROM sys.objects
       OFFSET 5 ROWS
       FETCH NEXT 5 ROWS ONLY

IIF works just like the instant IF in Excel
TRY_CONVERT and TRY_PARSE both perform the same function as CONVERT and PARSE respectively, but these new version will return a NULL instead of raising an error if the conversion or parse fails
OFFSET and FETCH are good for pagination, in the example above it would return rows 6-10
Happy studying!

90 Days to MCSA - Week 2 YouTube video training playlist

I have been watching some video training on YouTube and found these videos to be pretty well made and contain some good review points for exam 70-461. It can be pretty basic in a lot of places but it's always good to brush up before the test. Check it out: