My Weekly Bookmarks for October 16th

Here’s my bookmarked links for the week ending Friday, October 16th:

PASS Election Links

• The PASS Board of Directors Election – Joe Webb shares his opinion about the election.
• Vetting the PASS Board of Directors candidates – K. Brian Kelly weighs in on the debate.
• PASS Board of Directors Debate – Transparency and Vision – Steve Jones talks about the process of nominating candidates for the election.

PASS Summit Links

• What color should my hair be for #sqlpass? – Denny Cherry believes in democracy.
• Important Info for PASS Summit Volunteers – Colin Stasiuk is organizing folks for the upcoming Summit.
• Free Registration for the Summit… SQLServerPedia / Quest Software / Brent Ozar THANKS!!! – We hooked up Colin Stasiuk with a free pass to PASS for his outstanding work with the community.
• What is Professional Development? – Jason Massie is helping to jump-start a Professional Development virtual chapter for PASS.

SQL Server Links

• Table Variables Are Only in Memory: Fact or Myth – Grant Fritchey demolishes another popular performance tuning myth.
• Filtered Stats to Counter Data Skew Issues – If you’ve got “lumpy” data, filtered stats can help you get better query plans.
• SQL Server Legend – Data Files and Threads – SQL Server checks to see how many physical drives are involved, not how many data files are involved, when starting new threads.
• Free T-SQL Database Maintenance Scripts – Brad McGehee points to some excellent script resources. I’ve been using Ola’s scripts on a recent project.
• Raw Materials: Preparing for Disaster – The real meaning of a disaster for DBAs.
• SQL University and why you should be attending – Great feedback on Jorge Segarra’s blog series.
• UDF Overhead – A simple example – Quick demonstration code showing how user-defined functions can impact SQL Server performance.
• Tracking expensive queries with extended events in SQL 2008 – Paul Randal writes about a subject I gotta dive more into.
• SQL University Hoops Practice – Another funny entry in the SQL University series. Here, Tom LaRock is drilling the basics.
• Amnesia Again, I Think, but I Don’t Remember, Really – Tom LaRock’s blog entry is worth it just for the Cookie Monster picture.
• SQL Lunch/Call for Speakers – Another neat community service for education – 30-minute presentations twice a month.
• Things to consider when setting up database mirroring – By Paul Randal. Pay close attention if you’re running mirroring on multiple databases.
• SQL Server and Jumbo Frames – It’s the legendary /faster switch! Well, no, but it’s close. Impacts iSCSI too.
• What a backed up Database Mirror looks like – Database mirroring works great – until it doesn’t, and you’re backed up, and you have no idea how long it’s gonna take before you can fail over.
• Interview With Rod Colledge About The Book SQL Server 2008 Administration in Action – Great interview, covers things DBAs need to know.

IT Links

• Unscheduled 50-Minute Outage of My Windows Azure Apps in USA-Northwest on 10/16/2009 6:00 AM PT – This is why you can’t take anybody’s word when they say, “Don’t worry, our cloud has built-in high availability.”
• Augmented Reality to the max with Layars for iPhone 3GS – Just added this to my iPhone to play with on the road the next few weeks. You look through the iPhone’s camera, and Layars overlays useful info over the top like restaurant reviews.
• Good advice can come from anywhere, but so can bad advice! – When someone gives you tech advice, think about their background. When someone’s got a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
• Hitachi implicated in Sidekick outage – Storage Soup – More fingerpointing.
• EMC denies blog claim that its SAN was involved in Sidekick outage – TMobile Sidekicks lost their data recently, and there’s some finger-pointing going on.

The Junk Drawer

• Static – XKCD comic about protection. You. Must. Read. This.
• Headline Fail – Somebody clearly had it out for Mr. Colon.
• How to Defeat Burnout and Stay Motivated – Common-sense tips on how to do a better job.
• CULTURE: The Gentlemen’s Guide to Dressing – This sounds odd coming from somebody who hands out vendor t-shirts, but look – if you wanna be stylish, read this.
• Flowchart Excellence – Make sure your flowchart doesn’t suck – check out these killer examples.
• Afraid of Presenting? Try Toastmasters – It’s probably too late to improve your speaking skills before the PASS Summit next month, but there’s always next year!
• The Public Speaker :: How To Add Humor To Your Talks – Great tips.

These bookmarks are automatically imported from my bookmarks at Delicious.com. If you’d like to get up-to-the-minute updates on what I’m bookmarking, you can subscribe to my bookmark RSS feed.