SQL Server Links
New PCI Express solid state drive benchmarked – HotHardware got their hot hands on a prototype of the upcoming OCZ Z-Drive and got “reads in excess of 500MB/sec and writes in excess of 400MB/sec”, which translates to a nice little 4-8 disk RAID array of conventional magnetic hard drives. I really like the sounds of these things to shed TempDB load. No word yet on price or release dates.
Failover Clustering Supported on Virtual Machines – frankly, if you weren’t doing virtualization before, this probably wasn’t what was holding you back, but it’s out anyway.
Bob Horkay after a long day
SQL Server startup problems due to affinity masking – Bob Horkay runs into problems with an active/active cluster on HP Polyserve and explains the solution. Active/active clusters save money, but you need a good DBA. (Like Bob.) This stuff isn’t set-it-and-forget-it.
SQLBatman is now Thomas LaRock: SQLRockstar – Tom rebranded his blog, and Phil Factor and I carried on a conversation about branding in the comments.
SQL Backup Cleanups – before you use scripts to automatically delete old bak files, Jason Massie explains why you should check the archive bit. I’ve been bitten by this one too when my backup guys swore the tape backups were working – except they weren’t.
Drop and Recreate All Indexes – copying a lot of data between servers is made easier with Jeremiah Peschka’s script.
Are You Down with BPA? – the Best Practices Analyzer is like getting a Microsoft Risk Assessment Program (RAP) visit for free. Speaking of RAPs…
Ken Simmons’ SQL RAP – we haven’t decided the winner yet in Michelle Ufford’s SQL RAP contest, but I can tell you Ken’s rap got a perfect 10.0 from me.
SQL Server 2008 Developer Training Kit – Pinal Dave points out free training materials for developers who don’t mind digging through PowerPoint and demos.
Cloud and Virtualization Links
Ten Slides from the Microsoft SDS TechEd Session – violates all kinds of rules about good presentations, but hey, it makes a good blog post.
Send Amazon your USB disks – wanna load a ton of data onto Amazon S3 for backup, like a large volume of images (no, not pr0n) or database backups, but you don’t have a fast upload connection? Now they take eSATA and USB drives. One-time $80 fee and $2.49 per hour, but that’s pretty fair. I worked for a company that needed offsite backup of a ton of billing images, and they had years of archives online. This would have been the easiest way to get the archived data to S3, and then it’d be easy to stay current using conventional uploads.
Amazon offers load balancing and monitoring for EC2 – Amazon EC2 is a cloud-based virtualization host where you can spin up new instances of SQL Server, Windows, MySQL, etc. Now they’ve kicked it up a notch with CloudWatch, a service to monitor your instances and scale up by turning on new instances when your app’s getting overwhelmed with load. Of course, your app still needs to handle some of the scaling – you can’t just turn on a bunch of SQL Servers and hope for the best – but they do include a load balancer service. Interesting, but not for SQL Server users yet.
Junk Drawer
MVP Award Trophy
Steve Jones’ MVP prize arrived – a USB plasma ball? Seriously? Wow, if this is the MVP award, I’d hate to see the LVP award. (I’m kidding, of course – he got the USB plasma ball from the Microsoft company store. The real MVP award plasma ball is at least 8″ across.)
StackOverflow Grows Again – coder Geoff Dalgas becomes full-time employee number 3. It’s so cool seeing this service grow and gather momentum.
Wolfram Alpha is Nothing Like Google – I agree with Aaron Alton’s explanation of why Google doesn’t have anything to fear from Wolfram Alpha. I am so totally unimpressed by Wolfram Alpha: it’s a visually beautiful answer to a question nobody’s asking. Congratulations – I have never searched for the temperature on the day I was born, nor am I inclined to now that it’s even easier.
Inside a Datacenter – getting a peek inside a datacenter usually requires some nasty security agreements and a ban on photography. Watching videos like these is like geek pr0n.
