PowerPivot for Excel "Not loaded. The Managed Add-in Loader failed to initialize."

Error when trying to enable the PowerPivot for Excel add-in for Office 2010 reads:
"Not loaded.  The Managed Add-in Loader failed to initialize."

If the installation of the PowerPivot for Excel add-in succeeded, the add-in should be enabled in the Excel Add-ins options panel.  If not, you might see the above error when clicking on the Manage -> "COM Add-ins" -> GO.

Unfortunately, the help provided in this social.msdn thread proved to be accurate.
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sqlkjpowerpivotforexcel/thread/3ec71eec-288b-4b2c-a404-a1740103e483

Don't waste your time like I did uninstalling the PowerPivot for Excel Add-in, repairing office, reinstalling the Office Shared Features or Office Tools... and multiple orders of the above.  Just uninstall the add-in, uninstall Office (altogether, it seems, is necessary), reinstall Office with the Office Shared Features all enabled, reinstall the Add-in.

It is silly, but that's the only way I got it to work.

Database Design Contest at the 2012 AITP Region 3 Student Conference

Had a great Friday in Lafayette, LA on the campus of the University of Louisiana-Lafayette.  31 different teams submitted database designs on my problem statement that required an ERD and sample data set.  The database design contest was sponsored by the Baton Rouge SQL Server User Group, a chapter of PASS.

When judging, I didn't see any identifying info besides a randomly-assigned number. I was happy to announce that the winner of the contest got a perfect grade on a 14-factor grading system, and that the top six places all got more than a 90% grade.  A big thanks to my Baton Rouge colleague Kristen Reeves, a former speaker at the BRSSUG, for helping me grade the entries.

Congratulations to all the contestants at the 2012 AITP Region 3 Student Conference Database Design contest!

Performance Tuning Presentation from October 2012 BRSSUG Meeting

Thanks to the 15+ folks who attended the Baton Rouge SQL Server User Group meeting last night!  I hope everyone enjoyed "everyone gets a book" night!

I presented on SQL Server Performance tuning, which began with Michelle Ufford's article from GoDaddy on how she saw massive performance gains just by correcting columns to more appropriate data types.  Here's a link to that article: https://web.archive.org/web/20130629210916/http://inside.godaddy.com/scaling-database-data-types/

Then we went through database compression, indexing and execution plans, index INCLUDE structure, the missing indexes feature, how foreign keys can affect performance, isolation modes and MAXDOP.

I've uploaded all my sample scripts in a .zip file to the brssug.org website here for you to download.

Thanks for attending, see you November 14!

UPDATE 20141104: Link to a cached copy of Ufford's article.