Just a quick heads-up: Microsoft updated the SQL Server 2008 Books Online for January, 2009. Microsoft has stated that they plan to publish web updates to the SQL Server 2008 Books Online pretty often so watch this site (or MSFT's site) for updates: We plan to publish Web updates to...

Over at LearnItFirst, I often get to be the one in charge of picking out the (background) music that we listen to while coding/designing. Right now, since I'm doing a blog post instead of programming, we're listening to a bit of lively Rod Stewart - Never a Dull Moment (amazon)....

The truncated mean is an average over a set obtained after you actually ignore the highest and lowest numbers. For example: given a set of the three numbers 100, 200 and 300, the "average" would be 200. We would add 100, 200, and 300 then divide by the number of...