SQL Server Links
Disk Partition Alignment Best Practices Whitepaper – just this week I was talking to a company that migrated their data over to a brand new SAN without setting partition alignment first, and they got much worse performance than their old SAN. The vendor’s answer: you forgot to align your partitions. Back it all up, blow it away, set the alignment, and restore it. Ouch.
StackOverflow DevDays tour – meet other developers in these regional one-day $99 conferences in San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Washington DC and London. I’m attending the SF one. Toronto’s almost sold out already.
Why you gotta use the right field types – if you’re only storing 10 characters of data, you don’t need a 50-character bag. The bigger the bag, the more the bag weighs, and your SQL Server slows down because it’s gotta carry all these big bags. Michelle Ufford explains (with much more accurate language) how this affects your SQL Server performance.
The myth of transactions per second – Bert Scalzo explains why this metric isn’t the best number to focus on.
Find the last time a table was updated – common problem: you want to drop a database (preferably all of them) but you need to know if they’re still in use. Pinal Dave shows how to find out if any tables are being updated.
How to remove duplicate rows from a table – Denny Cherry writes a solution that will teach you something about T-SQL just by reading it.
Page internals investigation procedure – Michelle is obsessed with what SQL Server stores on the disk. Between this proc and her DBCC PAGE trick to show fragmentation, I know who to call when I’m curious about the page internals.
T-SQL to find physical and logical processors – Buck Woody answers a question we’ve asked each other at Quest maybe half a dozen times, and now I feel dumb as a rock for not seeing the hyperthread_ratio field. Doesn’t work with virtualized servers, though.
SQL Server on Windows 7 and 2008 R2 – in a nutshell, SQL 2005 SP3 and 2008 SP1 are supported on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
Cloud and Virtualization Links
Native VHD support in Windows – this is gonna be big, and years from now we’re gonna wonder how we lived without it.
Microsoft iSCSI target software now available – wanna deploy your own cluster? MSDN & TechNet subscribers can download Windows Storage Server 2008 with iSCSI Goodness for frrrreeeee. This would make for a slick virtualization storage array. It’s times like this when I wish I didn’t already have other time-consuming hobbies.
Junk Drawer
Should Have Used Twitter
XKCD on how to handle problems – it blows me away when people have a production outage and they respond by posting a message on a forum or on Twitter asking for help. When your users can’t access their stuff, call your vendor immediately and start a support ticket. Otherwise, when the system still isn’t up a few hours later, you look like a complete moron. “What? I posted a message in a chat room. That should have fixed it.”
Police solve case of stolen bacon – and it was an inside job.
Chad Miller’s blog on PowerShell – I’m still not lifting a finger to learn PowerShell, but if you’re interested, Grant Fritchey found this really good blog about it. As Lincoln said, “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”
How Twitter changed Paul Randal’s life – in which he utters the timeless words that shall be etched throughout my house, “Brent Ozar…everything he says is true.” BOOYAH. My entire life has prepared me for this moment. I’d like to start by saying, “I don’t have to pay for bacon.”
Blip.FM on borrowed time – HELLO, people, this is 1999 calling and they want their business model back. This is why I don’t even bother jumping on the Music-Site-Du-Jour anymore – they’re all doomed. Good luck with that.
Why you need a blogging business model – great quote: “(blogging) without a blogging plan is like learning to cook without using any recipes – success is possible, but not probable.”
Burning Fight photos – great collection of photos from a concert festival, really does a great job of capturing emotion. Found via Jeremiah Peschka’s links of the week.
You know, funnily enough, that XKCD on how to handle problems, and your joke about forums, is exactly the reason why I’ve stopped using open source software that I can’t buy a support contract for. I don’t care how great it is, if I can’t call someone on the phone and get support for my exploding [insert product here], I don’t want to use it.
Oh god, I just sounded like a manager.
Mr. Ozar, why are you not into Powershell? I’m not killing myself to learn it either, but it seems at least interesting and a positive development for the Windows world, notoriously shaky in the scripting department (I wish I could get the time I spent messing with VBScript back).
Personally since I had an interest in learning Python, and it’s useful on multiple platforms, not just Windows (and furthermore gives those who want it access to the .Net world via IronPython), I’ve decided to develop my knowledge there rather than dilettanting it across every language in the world (tempting as that is), but like I said, I’m curious as to why you aren’t that interested (I’m interested in your lack of interest).
Jeremiah – reminds me of one of my favorite quotes: “Open Source: if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces!”
SDC – because I don’t want to learn a language that doesn’t make me *more* valuable in my career. If I learn PowerShell, I can administer…file servers. (I’m exaggerating here, but you get the point.) If I learn, say, C#, I can build something that I can sell to somebody else, or at least build something that sells for money. People won’t be delivering entire products built start-to-finish on PowerShell that sell for a lot of money. It comes down to an opportunity cost: how much am I personally going to make by learning PowerShell, versus another product. The guys learning PowerShell right now are really excited because it makes them better sysadmins, but that’s about the last direction I want to take my career, second only to better TPS reporter.
I can totally understand why sysadmins want to learn it, though, and why junior guys want to learn it. It does make them incrementally more valuable – but not order-of-magnitude more valuable. It makes their job order-of-magnitude easier – but doesn’t increase their salary likewise. That’s where they lose focus.
Just remember, open source is only free if you place no value on your time.
Brent – thanks for the feedback, I agree with the sentiments: a good thing, but not the direction I want to go now.
As for Open Source, I’m such a stubbornly independent dude I can usually work around problems I encounter w/out too much time or trouble. When that fails, I almost always have found a helping hand as many Open source projects have rich communities. Also there’s always Red Hat if you want the support for Linux.
But enough of that, this is BrentO’s blog, not the open source religious war forum (although I did find the quote funny).
Ha! I just e-mailed you a week ago about similar data type tests and whether they were too trivial for a blog article.