Two weeks ago today, I asked you folks if you were interesting in syndicating your blog at SQLServerPedia. I’ve been amazed at the outpouring of interest, and today we’re up to 19 blogs with the addition of Gail Shaw and Kendal Van Dyke:
Gail Shaw of SQLinTheWild
I first started reading Gail’s blog after Jason Massie started sharing some of her items in Google Reader. She does a great job of explaining concepts. Some of her recent highlights have been:
- All Indexes Are Unique – no, really. This is kind of a trick post, but pay attention to the point, because it can impact what fields you pick for the index. Hint: even nonclustered indexes include some information about the table’s unique index.
- Index columns, selectivity and inequality predicates – understanding how the engine picks an index for your query helps you build better indexes and better queries. I’ve learned a lot from this series.
- Seek or scan? – how does SQL Server determine when to pick one over the other?
Kendal Van Dyke of My Life as a SQL Server DBA
Kendal Van Dyke
Kendal, aka SQLDBA on Twitter, is easily identifiable by his fresh-faced avatar. When he asked if he could use his avatar as his headshot on the SQLServerPedia Editors page, I slapped myself for not seeing that coming. And of course I couldn’t say no. I’ll never be able to recognize the guy in person though – he’d better be wearing a t-shirt with the avatar on it. Some of his recent blog posts include:
- Disk Performance: RAID 10 Stats – when you hear guys like me and Jimmy May yell and holler about how important it is to do your partition alignment and your allocation unit sizing, you might not take our word for it. After all, we’re crazy. Fortunately, Kendal has done all the hard work and actually shown proof of how some of these settings affect your performance. I’m really looking forward to the rest of this series.
- Sysprep Breaks Your SQL Server – if you use imaging tools to deploy lots of servers, they can cause problems with SQL Server’s security. Kendal shows how to fix it.
- Installing SQL Server Express as a Default Instance – isn’t it a pain how every Express Edition install is a named instance (starting with something like $MSSQL) by default? Wanna know how to install it as a default instance, just like the big boy version?
More Good News to Come
I’m excited at the way this thing has just totally taken off. Andy Grant, Christian Hasker and I weren’t sure if we were the only ones who believed in the power of syndication, the need to maintain control over your own personal brand, and the desire to get blog posts seen by more community members.
We’re changing the way database administrators communicate.
We used to be in a rock concert in a stadium: a few people played onstage, and they played really loud. Everybody else stood around and admired their work, but never really got a chance to approach the stage and get involved.
Today, we’re moving towards a small, intimate coffee shop’s open mike night. We might not all be Bono, but because there’s so many more of us, we can reach out to more people individually. We can have personal conversations instead of just listening. If we have a question about someone’s writings, we can simply dash off a Tweet or comment on their blog and get fast, personal feedback.
I’m excited – but I promise not to start reading poetry.
