SQL Server & Cloud Links for the Week

Things I found interesting this week (written a little ahead of time and scheduled for posting on Friday, since I’ll be on the road to Michigan):

SQL Server Links

Aaron Bertrand’s Stored Procedure Best Practices – I like using Toad for SQL Server to write stored procedures because it does all of the formatting stuff for me.  If you don’t use Toad, Aaron lays out a lot of good practices around formatting, parenthesis, etc.

Estimate how long it will take to kill a SQL Server process – how to get a progress report when you kill a process.

SQL Server 2005 Multi-Site Clustering with Windows Server 2008 – clustering is a great way to get high availability, but it hasn’t been useful for long-distance clusters for disaster recovery.  Rob explains your options in an easy-to-read way.

Whoops: the DBA Quiz – database administrators blog about two of their mistakes.  Chris Shaw started it, and so far there’s been answers at Made2Mentor.com, SQLBatman.com and StatisticsIO.com.

Cloud Links

I don’t have any cloud links for this week, but I’m curious to see how my SQLIO performance tests against Amazon EC2 servers are received.  The results are just too horrifying – I have to dig into this next week with Amazon to see what’s going on.

The Junk Drawer

Best Buy drops MSI Wind price to $349 – a little 2.8 pound netbook with 1gb ram, 120gb hard drive, and a 10″ screen with 1024×600 resolution. Great deal.

Nutshell Mail launches to the public – if you work at a company that blocks personal email (like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, etc) and you want to get your mail during work hours, Nutshell Mail is the answer. They poll your personal email and send you a recap at your work email address.  If you want the full details of the email, you can fetch it via email – all without hitting web firewalls.  Plus it’ll fetch messages from Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and more.  There goes your productivity.

Barack Obama tells it like it is – regardless of your political affiliation, that picture is amusing.