So you want to write a book

Misc
I had posted a while back on the process of book writing. It was an attempt to educate while scaring you half to death. Writing a book is extremely hard work, especially when you try to do it while holding down a full-time job and maintaining something resembling a life. Enough scare tactics though. My Apress editor, Jonathan Gennick, great guy, wrote a detailed overview of how to put together your book proposal. The overview is targeted at Apress, but that’s largely a question of formatting. The gist of the article, and the wisdom and excellent information within it, are going to be applicable to any & all publishers. Some of the stuff that really jumped out at me: You’re writing the proposal not only to sell the book idea,…
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No really. When did this statement start?

SQL Server
I thought I had an interesting answer to the question. Unfortunately Adam Machanic, who has been working in this specific area quite a bit longer than I have, and, let's face it, is a bit smarter, pointed out (in the comments) the possibility that I didn't have this quite right. I ran all his tests and sure enough, it wasn't working the same way that I saw it work. First, I tried modifying his query so that it ran the SELECT statements from the DMV's between the operations, but this didn't change the results, start_time and last_request_start_time were the same. From a scientific stand-point, if no one can replicate your results, the experiment failed. So I went back and tried again. To be sure I got things right and wasn't, somehow,…
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