This might come as a surprise to you, but I have a day job.
(It certainly comes as a surprise to me some days. “What? What do you mean I have to finish that project? I HAVE TO BLOG, dammit!”)
In my official role at Quest Software, I do a lot of interesting stuff. I wanted to share some of my experiences with you, but I didn’t want my blog to turn into the official bullhorn of the Quest SQL Server marketing department. I have a million things I wanted to say about Quest stuff, but I didn’t want you to feel like I was “pitching” you things on my blog. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not that Quest was asking me to blog about their stuff – it was just the opposite. I wanted an outlet where I could blog freely about cool features and products.
I wasn’t alone inside Quest, either – a lot of us wanted to share things like:
- Why you might not be able to publish benchmarks – I’ve gotten a couple of requests lately from bloggers who want to publish benchmarks of things like LiteSpeed compression ratios or Spotlight performance overhead, and it’s a tricky issue.
- How to add custom counters in Spotlight – man, if I’ve heard this question once, I’ve heard it a million times. “Your competitor puts the Perfmon counter ObscureMeaninglessStatistic on their dashboard, and they say it’s really important. Why doesn’t Spotlight do that, huh? Your product must suck if you don’t know about ObscureMeaninglessStatistic!” Whatever, man – any counter you wanna add, you can add.
- What does my boss do all day? – and yes, he really does have a phone glued to his ear.
- How do you query backup files in LiteSpeed – one of those slick backup features that works for both native and LiteSpeed backups, and you don’t have to buy any additional products to do it.
So we’ve started a new blog for the SQL Server business unit at Quest. You can subscribe to our RSS feed or subscribe via email.
Right now, we’ve got bloggers from product management and from marketing, and over time we’ll probably be adding bloggers from support, QA, development, and more. We’re recording howto videos to showcase product features you probably didn’t know about, too.
To recap, here’s where I blog:
- BrentOzar.com – all kinds of wacky stuff about SQL Server, virtualization, writing, whatever comes to mind.
- SQLServerPedia.com – me and other bloggers, but only stuff about SQL Server is allowed.
- QuestKB.com – focuses on Quest SQL Server products and staff.
How do you manage to get any sleep?
I don’t have any production servers to manage.