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Mea Culpa: TweetRandomizer-gate

If you鈥檝e ever read Spider-Man or spent any sort of time around the Marvel Universe (movies included) you鈥檒l have no doubt heard the immortal words of when he told young Pete Parker 鈥渨ith great power comes great responsibility鈥. Today that lesson has hit home in the form of being by Brent Ozar ( | ).

I use this quote from ole Ben because as someone who is prominent on Twitter I should be cognizant of the content I put out there, and that includes the use of auto tweet tools and sites such as TweetRandomizer. For those not familiar with this particular site it 鈥渃hooses鈥 a random follower of yours to be picked as 鈥淔ollower of the Day鈥 and sends that tweet out from your account. While this tweet only gets sent once, if a bunch of other people in your stream begin using the same service it creates a LOT of noise in your stream and the value of it quickly goes down. Not only that but when spam bots auto follow your account, and you don鈥檛 clean them out, they have an equal chance to get 鈥渃hosen鈥 and, essentially, endorsed by you. I don鈥檛 know about you but if @NatalieSpam0103134 gets chosen as your Follower of the Day and there鈥檚 a picture of a young lady doing certain in the avatar 测辞耻鈥檙别 not going to look to good to potential and current followers essentially promoting them. I first started using this particular service out of curiosity after seeing Leo Laporte ( | ) use it during one of his shows to choose a random follower for a contest. I enabled the service, pretty much forgot about it and never took into account how annoying it鈥檇 be on the other end of the stream. Also I never really got much value of it so I probably should鈥檝e disabled it a few days after enabling it. Long story short I apologize for clogging up people鈥檚 streams with crap. Be careful with what you allow into your stream and keep the content under your control. Brent has some good points in his article today about it. Thanks for following along and remember, it could .

Update: As long as I鈥檓 taking responsibility for this mess I should show how to kill it.

Step 1: Sign in to your Twitter account on the website at

Step 2: Click on the Settings link in the top right-hand corner.

Step 3: Once 测辞耻鈥檙别 in Account Settings click on Connections (see screenshot)

Step 4: Scroll down the list and locate the application you don鈥檛 want to Tweet from your account anymore and click on the Revoke Access link.

It鈥檚 probably a good idea to check this list every so often and make sure only sites and programs you want have access to your account. If there are applications or sites that you don鈥檛 use anymore on this list, you should revoke their access.

Update 2: If you’re really interested in who I recommend, check out

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Advice DBA SQL Server Syndicated Syndication Tips

Starting the SQL Journey: Part II

So in my I talked about my personal journey. In this post I鈥檒l go step-by-step what I did to help along the path of learning all this SQL goodness.听

Tip 1 鈥 Crawl Before You Walk鈥

Don鈥檛 know what a SQL statement is? Think T-SQL is an alternative to Coffee-SQL? Fear not, like everything else in this crazy world there鈥檚 tons of resources to learn from. One of the first places I learned anything from was W3 Schools website. The site is more aimed at web developers but they have a (note: SQL is NOT SQL Server. SQL is a language, SQL Server is a product). There are also numerous other websites that teach SQL from the ground up such as or . A quick will get you a plethora of options.

Tip 2 – Choose Thy Path!

Moving on from learning basic SQL syntax its time to learn your product. To learn by theory is one thing but its another to have hands on experience with the tools and actually see what a query result looks like and what not. Now I realize that I’m a SQL Server guy but I’ll be fair and list several vendor options. These are all the free editions of the respective platforms:

While I gave several options, this blog is SQL Server-centric so my examples and walk-throughs will keep within that realm. Which brings us to the next step…

Step 3 – Don’t Pigeon Hole Yourself, LEARN EVERYTHING!

Ok maybe not everything but you get the gist. This tip not only applies to learning your specific product but pretty much anything. Just because you’re a DBA doesn’t mean you shouldn’t/can’t learn some basic web development so you know what’s going on on the other side of your queries and vice versa. One of the things that allowed me to reach my current position is that I was always looking to learn more, more, more. Yes, I’m a SQL Server guy but what’s Oracle? How’s it work? What are the differences between SQL Server and Oracle? What else is out there? Even within SQL Server you have so much to learn than just basic server setup. There’s not only the administration piece but there’s also performance tuning, all the business intelligence pieces and the wide world of development and much more. I personally ended up going down the DBA track myself but I still like to play around with the Business Intelligence pieces like Reporting Services and SSIS since they’re interesting pieces unto themselves and work-wise I’m a better employee and professional if I’m able to understand all the pieces of the puzzle.

Tip 4 – There’s a Community, Make Use of It

One of the best things I ever did was start attending user groups. My first experience with them was with the community. I lucked out since my manager volunteered to be the group’s leader so meetings were held in our offices. The meetings were useful since you got to meet others in the community who made use of the same technology in different ways. Getting to meet others and swap stories was a really cool experience. From there I learned about the local SQL user groups ( and the ) and started attending those. Lately I’ve been branching out more in to the community by making use of social networking tools such as LinkedIn and Twitter. I’ve also started contributing to the community by starting this blog. I can’t tell you how much more satisfying experience it has been, for me anyways, to really be actively involved in the technical community.

Tip 5 – That Guy Seems Smart, Let’s Ask Him!

Before I started getting actively involved with the community my primary objective was just to learn, learn, learn! In doing so one of the first things you鈥檒l learn besides the topic 测辞耻鈥檙别 focusing on is who are the people in your field who are the respective experts. For instance it was a event that I attended where I first learned about and how he was one of the best SSIS gurus around. So from then on whenever I needed to learn something related to SSIS I would defer to his blogs and his recommendations. I鈥檓 sure everyone has their own methods of learning from others but I just wanted to share my methodology. Another method that pays off is finding not only those guys who know their stuff but are also entertaining (that鈥檚 how I discovered and ).
Tip 6 鈥 Never Stop Learning
This week is the SSWUG Virtual Conference and one of the great things that I鈥檝e witnessed is that even the field experts are always learning something new from everyone else. In my opinion the one greatest thing to move forward is the willingness to always keep learning. And almost as important is this quote I heard once: 鈥淭he ability to succeed is directly proportional to your ability to ask for help.鈥
So that鈥檚 pretty much all I can think of for now. Feel free to add your own tidbits and advice in comments below!