SQL Server and Cloud Links for the Week

SQL Server Links

SQL Server 2008 Indexing Best Practices – Jose Barreto’s notes from a class taught by Kimberly Tripp.

Updated index defrag script – Michelle Ufford follows up on her webcast with a script update too.

Using GUIDs as Primary Keys – Kimberly Tripp lays out all the reasons this is a bad idea.

What DBAs can Learn from Doctors and Pilots – Mike Walsh suggests that we need to do a better job with checklists and plans.

50 Things to Know Before Migrating to MySQL – the article is targeted at Oracle DBAs, but the same concepts apply to SQL Server DBAs.  We take a lot of things for granted in a SQL Server environment.

Cloud and Virtualization Links

Cisco Announces A Line of Servers – virtualization abstracts the hardware away and makes it a real commodity: you can swap any hardware in and out from under your virtual servers.  Cisco’s betting that they can step in and build a line of blade servers specifically targeted at the virtualization market, and that you’ll be able to buy everything (IP network, SAN networking and server hardware) from a single vendor.  A lot of bloggers analyzed the announcement, but I linked to my favorite one by StorageMojo.

Amazon EC2 pricing changes – if you’re willing to commit to a year in advance, you can get cheaper pricing. Neat option for disaster recovery, and I’ll be blogging more about using EC2 for SQL Server log shipping as the SSWUG V-Conference approaches.

iSCSI Multipathing in VMware ESX – virtualization still isn’t easy enough, and reading through this post, you’ll see what I mean.

Junk Drawer

FizzBin: The Secret Tech Support Handshake – wouldn’t it be cool if us IT gurus had a secret word that we could use to bypass first level support?

More Microsoft Team Blogs – the level of transparency at Microsoft around blogging kicks butt.

How to Lose Customers – Aaron Alton talks about changing policies, overpromising, and setting expectations.

WeFollow: The Twitter Directory – you send a tweet to @WeFollow with three keywords, and they log you in their directory for people searching for those keywords.  Might be a flash in the pan, but worth a shot.  Right now it’s just miserable trying to find people on Twitter.