SQL Server and Cloud Links for the Week

Yes, it’s Monday.  I’m late, blame the turkey.  Happy Holidays!

SQL Server Links

Best SQL Server Blog Posts of 2008 – Jason Massie, that sneaky devil, uses that headline and then turns around to bait you into using Google Reader.  He’s right, though, and I’ll post a quick explanation of how Reader works here shortly.  You should resolve to use it in the New Year.

Should you install antivirus on SQL Servers? Denny Cherry says yes, and I agree – as long as you follow Denny’s recommendations.  I’ve seen instances where SQL Server won’t start correctly because antivirus software grabbed a lock on an mdf/ldf file before SQL Server started.  I’d also add a reason to his list: not all SQL Servers just run SQL and nothing else.  Sometimes you’re dealing with other third party apps on there and their admins will RDP in to do administration.  Those folks are virus-prone.  People are the problem. <sigh>

Should you run SQL Server in VMware? Buck Woody says no, and I DISagree.  He says multiple instances are a better solution for consolidation, but I disagree.  VMware gives you OS isolation so that you can have different OS admins on each box – something you can’t do with multiple instances.  Sure, in theory the SQL admins don’t need to be OS admins, but good luck with that.  Second, VMware buys you hardware independence: if you need to do firmware updates, hardware upgrades, datacenter shuffles, recabling, etc, just VMotion the guest OS’s over to another VMware host, and you have zero downtime.  VMware’s selling point isn’t making SQL Server administration better, but making OS administration better.

Jeremiah Peschka’s links for the week – the very first link is about best practices for developers who are becoming DBAs.  The third link is about reading execution plans.  Nuff said.  Great read.

Understanding SQL Server full-text indexes – in-depth article by Robert Sheldon, one of those articles that I don’t bother reading right away and instead just bookmark for the next time I need to monkey with fulltext.

LINQ: Enabling or Entangling? – Kevin Kline asks the ugly question, and Greg Low blogs about the same thing, mentioning that LINQ is the new Access.

Cloud Links

Soocial.com is 100% on Amazon Web Services – I’d never heard of the site, but that’s kinda what I would expect – only startups would go 100% in the cloud right now.  Still an interesting read to see that a company adopted this pure-cloud solution.

Junk Drawer

BrightKite now cross-posts photos to Flickr – BrightKite is location-based social networking.  When you go somewhere, you check in with your mobile phone or email client.  You can see who else has been there, who is nearby, and you get alerted when people show up.  You can upload photos to BrightKite, thereby adding photos to a location’s placestream, so other people can see what’s going on at that location.  Now they’ve added a new feature: they’ll cross-post your photos over to your Flickr account, plus burn in geotagging info into your photo so that your Flickr maps show where your photos were taken.  Neat idea.

OpenOffice development is “profoundly sick” – and by that they mean a low number of developers, not a high level of awesomeness.  I never understood how OO.o was going to catch on when MS Office is so dang good.  Sure enough, OO.o development tailed off as the hype wore off, even though OO.o’s development is sponsored by Sun, which as it turns out, is having financial problems.  Makes you wonder about MySQL’s really long-term future.

Sh3n3rd’s last minute advice for men – yes, the holidays are over as you read this, but her gift tips will keep on giving.

LogMeIn on your iPhone – I swear by LogMeIn.  It’s a free app to remote control any of your computers anywhere.  Now they’ve got an iPhone client so you can control your computers from your iPhone, but at $30, hmmm.  Not too sure about that.