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My flight to the PASS European Summit and the PASS London chapter just got cancelled due to the volcanic ash mess.  We talked about trying to find more ways around it, like flying into other parts of Europe and then hoping to catch a train to Dusseldorf.  Ultimately the alternate routes were too expensive (both in money and time) and were too much of a gamble.  Being a database professional is often about managing risk, and the risks were just too high.

Thankfully for attendees, there will still be plenty of speakers present.  Those of us who can’t make it will be presenting remotely with LiveMeeting, and we’ll also have recorded versions of our sessions ready ahead of time in case there’s a connectivity problem.

Even last night, I got ready to head to the airport this morning in hope of catching a last-minute opened-up flight, but the latest news from the BBC’s live update page is enough to give me pause:

“1207 – Nato fighter jets have suffered engine damage after flying through volcanic ash cloud, a senior US official has said. The official gave few details except to say that a build-up of glass was found in the jet engines.”

I don’t want to be on the first round of planes going back through that ash cloud.  All it takes is one plane to have engine problems, and they’ll turn the rest of the planes back.  I could end up diverted in a middle-of-nowhere airport with tons of people and no hotel rooms.

And it’s not like this is a small cloud.  NASA’s satellite photo of Europe this morning:

From NASA

My heart is with the thousands of people stranded all over the world, away from home.  I’m lucky enough that my travel plans were borked before they started.  Times like this remind us of what’s really important – our safety and our loved ones.  As I’ll always remember from Tim & Lori Edwards’ blog, “Remember, the people that you work for are waiting for you at home.”

The SQL Server 2008 R2 release date was April 21, 2010.  You can download SQL Server free as an evaluation version.

I’ve written a lot about the new features:

• SQL Server 2008 R2 Pricing and Feature Changes – the pricing is going up, but you get new features in Standard Edition.
• SQL Server 2008 R2: Virtualization for Databases – introduces the concept of the DAC Pack and relates it to virtualization.
• Data Tier Applications (DAC Packs) – explains what the DAC Pack means for DBAs.
• R2: Going Into the Clouds – discusses some longer-term implications around what DBAs do.
• SQL Server 2008 R2 Utility Control Point demo – I walk through it on video.
• SQL Server 2008 R2 FAQ – including the license changes for virtualization

I gotta be honest – I think the current implementation of the DAC Pack sucks. I’ll give you just one example that’s a complete showstopper for me – when you deploy a new version of a DAC Pack (aka database), SQL Server renames your old database, creates a new one, and copies all of your data from the old database to the new one.

Jabba offers Leia a DAC Pack

Got a 100GB database?  Better tell your users to go get some lunch.  And you’d better not hope something goes wrong in the process, or else they might need to make it a two-martini lunch.

Got any disaster recovery plans for that database?  Doing any log shipping or database mirroring?  Yeah, that won’t work either, because you’re talking about an all-new database.

Just doing a simple stored procedure change, nothing else?  Doesn’t matter – SQL Server will copy all the data, every time.  It’s like how maintenance plans handle index rebuilds – SQL Server just blindly does a ridiculous amount of work whether it’s needed or not, and no, you can’t have any say in how it works.

I would strongly, strongly advise against using DAC Packs in a production environment.  It’s not ready for prime time yet, and I’ve voiced that concern loud and clear to Microsoft.  I laugh when I write that, because I’m just a blogger – what the hell difference does my opinion make?  The feature’s already baked into the product and it’s got one foot out the door.  It sucks because the smart people are going to walk away with a very bad first impression of DAC Packs, and the not-so-smart ones are going to actually implement it and then get burned badly by the upgrade process.  But hey – that’s how you get smart, right?

I do love the idea of the DAC Pack, and I’m excited to see how it develops over time.  And I really like everything else I’ve seen in R2, too – I don’t have the slightest concern about deploying it in production on the release date.  Just go easy on the DAC Packs.

Update: maybe not May 21. I’m hearing secondhand (nothing NDA) that either the audience heard the dates wrong, or Microsoft announced it wrong.  I’m showing a couple of tweets below from audience members to support that it was probably the latter.

May 21?

And:

May 21?

Who’s the source, Luke?

I sense a disturbance in the release date

More news as it happens.

Update April 21: Microsoft scheduled a 7:30 AM Pacific conference call to announce something, but the SQL Server 2008 R2 download page leaked by 6:15, so the cat’s out of the bag.

The Microsoft Certified Masters program doesn’t run itself.  David Ikeda and Joe Sack manage the monster, and I’d like to take a minute to thank them for everything they do.

Someone’s gotta review the applicants. Not everybody gets accepted into the program.  Some candidates don’t have the necessary experience, and some are just looking for a shortcut to a big paycheck.  All it takes is one underqualified candidate, and the class gets seriously sidetracked by questions.  Keeping the bar high helps improve the Master-level training.

Someone’s gotta sit in on the class. In all three weeks of our rotation, David sat in the back of the room and tried to get real work done while simultaneously monitoring us.  He contributed to the discussion, guided the conversation back on track, and constantly asked us for feedback.

Someone’s gotta act on the suggestions. The MCM program is different than traditional Microsoft Learning courses.  It’s small, and it’s tailored to meet tough demands from tough customers.  The candidates in my rotation were chock full of ideas of things we’d love to see added or removed from the course, or things we would have done differently.  David had to listen to a bunch of loudmouthed DBAs – if you think one DBA is tough, try putting a dozen of the best ones in a room together and tell them the “right way” to do something.  They start rioting.

Someone’s gotta write the test questions and build the labs. Like I discussed in my article on the SQL MCM exams, it’s really hard to test DBAs when the best answer for almost everything is, “It depends.”  After every exam and after the final lab, we had a lot of fierce hallway debates about a handful of questions, but nobody walked out saying, “That test is total BS.”  Over and over, I heard candidates saying, “That test really gauges how well you know ___.” Building questions like that is hard.

Someone’s gotta work with the instructors. It’s hard to find good instructors who can drop everything and race to Bellevue for a week.  David and Joe have to manage their schedules, the rotation’s schedule, and make sure that the material and the people match up to Masters-level expectations.  You can’t explore everything inside SQL Server at the Master level in 3 weeks – there just isn’t time.

Throughout my rotation, I was completely impressed with the professionalism of David & Joe.  They’re doing a great service to both Microsoft and the attendees, and it’s not even their full-time job!  I salute them for their hard work and achievements, and I’m excited to see what the future brings for the program.  It’s in good hands.

Want to know more about the MCM program?  Check out my SQL Server Microsoft Certified Master page.

I need a backup presentation device when I travel. During my epic European trip failure, my laptop failed in Copenhagen, and all kinds of hell broke loose. I decided I’d always travel with a second device that could do PowerPoint presentations. For a while, I used a netbook, but I hated carrying fifteen pounds of gear on my shoulder through the airport.

I bought an iPad because:

• It has VGA output (albeit through a crappy dongle)
• It can do PowerPoint presentations
• It’s really light (1.5 pounds)
• It has a tiny charger (and can be charged via USB)

There’s plenty of places on the web where you can read volumes of well-written stuff about the iPad (Anandtech – Engadget), so I’ll just focus on the drawbacks that trouble me the most.

The Virtual Keyboard Sucks

I love my iPhone’s onscreen keyboard. I can type on that thing like nobody’s business, and sometimes I even do it without looking. I can’t call it touch-typing, since there’s no feel of keys, heh.

In theory, the iPad onscreen keyboard should be even better. It’s bigger, and in landscape mode, I should be able to set my hands down and sorta-touch-type. My hands fit great – here’s my right hand with my index finger on the J key, just like a real full-sized keyboard:

iPad Touch Typing

Looks great, right? Well, not so much. To figure out the problem, you have to compare the iPad keyboard with a real keyboard and see what my fingers are actually hovering over:

iPad Keyboard Differences

On a real keyboard, your four right fingers hover over J, K, L, and ;. On the iPad keyboard, they hover over J, K, L, and the return key. That one little difference, coupled with the keyboard size and lack of tactile feedback, means this is a really bad replacement for a real keyboard. Apple makes an iPad keyboard dock, but if I have to carry that around, I’m right back up to netbook territory.

On an iPhone, I just changed my method of typing altogether – I either use one thumb or two thumbs, depending on how fast I want to type. When the iPad is in landscape mode, two-thumb typing is impossible – the keyboard is just too darned wide. In portrait mode, it’s somewhat more doable for me, but I have pretty big hands. I’ve seen Erika try to type with it, and it just doesn’t work.

The Lack of Multitasking Sucks

The iPad is almost the perfect thing to carry around at conferences. The ten-hour battery life would let me take notes all day while responding to tweets and emails, and I wouldn’t have to drag a power adapter around or look for power outlets to recharge.  The form factor on this thing is great for a meeting/conference device.

Except that there’s no multitasking.  I could either take notes OR do Twitter OR do email.

The upcoming OS v4 upgrade will add multitasking (and support for Bluetooth keyboards, yay!), but it’s not coming out for the iPad until the fall. I’m crossing my fingers in the hope that the iPad will be the only thing I have to carry at the PASS Summit. I’d love to stop hassling with power outlets and shoulder bags.

The App Scene Sucks Right Now

Some of your favorite iPhone apps have been upgraded to add iPad support at no extra charge. Simply go into the App Store, hit Upgrade, and you’ll get all of the latest and greatest apps.

Some developers have decided to sell “HD” or “XL” versions of their apps for the iPad. Pay one price for the iPhone version, another price – usually much higher – for the iPad version. Forget the extra price – this is just painful to manage. Every couple of days, I go into the App Store looking to see if my favorite apps have been reintroduced for the iPad. I don’t want to do this manually – just alert me when there’s a new version of TripIt or RememberTheMilk available for the iPad. And no, I don’t want to run the regular iPhone versions on the iPad, because they look like hell. Even a lot of the new iPad app versions leave something to be desired – check out this WordPress app’s blog editing screen, which only shows a tiny sliver of my post content and wastes huge areas of the screen on greyed-out and non-scrolling title/tags/status fields:

WordPress on the iPad

Not good enough.

The Best Experiences?

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, he called it the best email experience, the best photos experience, the best web surfing experience, and the best video experience. I’d agree about two of them, but I didn’t really need a photo or video device, and I don’t think you do either.

The best web experience requires Flash.

I hate Flash. It’s slow, and the web sites that rely on it frustrate me. But I can’t argue that it’s the dominant tool out there for building interactive web sites (no offense, Silverlight guys.) Excluding Flash support means I can’t view a lot of web site videos, and that means it’s not the best web experience.

The best email experience requires a better keyboard.

I seriously prefer using the iPad to handle my mail over the laptop. It’s a quick, fun experience. It’s so fun, in fact, that I’ve started leaving the iPad propped up on my desk to act as a separate email monitor. But when it comes time to composing a reply of more than a paragraph, I prefer my iPhone keyboard over the iPad, and my laptop keyboard over that, and an ergonomic keyboard over all of those. The iPad’s keyboard is a very distant last place. If you insist on using the iPad keyboard, the Apple iPad case helps somewhat by tilting the iPad up as it lays on a flat surface.

The best video experience requires stereo speakers.

Listening to music or watching movies on the iPad infuriates the audiophile in me. It absolutely requires headphones. Mono sound comes out of just one speaker at the bottom of the iPad, or one side when your using it in landscape mode. I’m distracted by the audio, it’s so bad. Headphones makes this problem disappear, but he said this was the BEST video experience, and without headphones, that’s just not the case. And it doesn’t ship with headphones. Or the USB adapter. Or the VGA adapter. And $300 netbooks come with stereo speakers, USB, and VGA out.

My Bottom Line: Apple Users Only for Now

Today, the iPad is an expensive, limited alternative to a Windows 7-equipped netbook.  If you’re happy with a Windows laptop, you’ll prefer a Windows-equipped netbook over the iPad for day to day use. The iPad, sexy as it is, can’t compete with the practicality of a machine that offers multitasking and a physical keyboard. Months from now, when the iPad OS v4 brings multitasking to the party and when HTML5 video replaces Flash, things might be different.

If you’re an Apple iPhone user, though, full speed ahead.  You’re already used to a lot of the compromises in the iPhone OS, and the iPad will seem like the next logical step.  If I didn’t have to do so many SQL Server demos on the road, I’d switch from my laptop to the iPad.  I’m even kicking around the thought of building Amazon EC2 SQL Servers in the cloud to demo the things I need, and then booting them up to remote control them from my iPad for demos.  Stay tuned.

In the immortal words of David Bowie, “Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes….”

Disbanding the Editors

When we first unveiled the wiki, we expected to get flooded with crappy content.  We expected people to edit pages and type in some totally incorrect mumbo-jumbo like “Shrink your databases to improve performance!”  The good news is that we didn’t get that flood of bozos – but the bad news is that we didn’t get a flood of users, period.  The few articles we got were very well-thought-out.  Our bigger problem was that most of the users didn’t see themselves as qualified to write a wiki article.  When I talked to community members, they said the wiki process intimidated them.

Blog syndication, on the other hand, caught on like wildfire.  Not a week goes by that I don’t receive at least one new request to syndicate someone’s blog.  People feel comfortable writing their own blog posts in their own voice, and then contributing that material to the community.

Our problem isn’t filtering out lots of technically incorrect material.

Our problem is bubbling the best content to the top.

So we let loose Brett Epps (@Eppsilon) to solve the problem, and he created the Buzz features of SQLServerPedia.  It’s a Digg-style content aggregator that lets users vote up content, and it works no matter where the content lives.  We’re not out to just promote SQLServerPedia bloggers – we want to surface good content no matter where it lives.  We’re still working to promote SQLServerPedia bloggers, though, and I’ve got more ideas coming for that.

We’re disbanding the editors because it makes more sense to have the community do this kind of filtering. I just watched Up In The Air this weekend, which is all about firing people, so I’m having a tough time typing this with a straight face.

New Syndicated Blogger: Gethyn Ellis

Gethyn is a SQL Server consultant in the United Kingdom who works with SQL Server clustering, replication, DTS/SSIS, virtualization, and more.  He’s @SQLGRE on Twitter, and he blogs at the SEO-friendly URL http://blog.gre-sqlserver-solutions.com.  Some of his recent posts include:

• Granting Permissions on Stored Procedures – Gethyn comes up with a role that has the permissions he needs, then puts users into that role.  You can do this with all kinds of database-level permissions.
• About Differential Backups – what they do, and when you should use them.
• SP_Change_Users_Login – one of my favorite post-restore commands.

New Syndicated Blogger: The Data Chix

Audrey Hammonds and Julie Smith are our second tag-team bloggers, the first being Tim and Lori Edwards.  Audrey & Julie blog at http://DataChix.com, where they blog not just about technical things but about:

• Being a Datachick in a Developer’s World – reminds me of Tom LaRock’s new book, DBA Survivor, in that being a successful DBA is just as much about the soft skills as much as the technical ones.
• Using a CTE and ROW_NUMBER to Eliminate Dupes – combines two very cool things to make an even better one, and manages to work in a demo table called dbo.TableOfShame.
• The Case of the Mysterious Failing Packages – in which the villain is foiled by BIDS Helper.

Most Popular Blog Posts

Here’s what’s been burning up the hits in the last 30 days:

1. My Top 5 SQL Server Indexing Best Practices by Tim Ford
2. Implementing Real SSAS Drilldowns in SSRS Reports by Chris Webb
3. Grant Truncate Table Permissions in SQL Server by Bob Horkay
4. What TCP Port is SQL Server Running Under by Colin Stasiuk
5. Verify Block Size on NTFS by Bob Horkay
6. Update Statistics Before or After Index Rebuild by Colin Stasiuk
7. Deleting the Transaction Log by Gail Shaw
8. SSMS Error on Changes with Table Drops by Pinal Dave
9. T-SQL or SSMS – Same Thing Right by David Dye
10. PowerShell and SQL by John Pertell

SQLServerPedia’s new Buzz feature makes it easier for me to find what people are reading.  On the Popular page, I can just look at what people are upvoting.  Here’s some of the ones readers voted up this week that looked good to me:

Database Posts

Teaching SQL Server to Play Poker – Brad Schulz comes out with another genius trick.  This guy is awesome.

User Induced Data Loss Mitigation – sounds like a mouthful, but here’s what it boils down to: users drop tables.  About a year ago, SQL Server MVP Jason Massie started managing Oracle installations too, and he’s been posting about his experiences to compare the two platforms.

SQL Server Cheat Sheets – one-page mini-docs for commonly used data types, functions, creations, etc.

24 Hours of PASS – a round-the-clock, round-the-globe live event with a different free presentation every hour.

How to Make SQL Server Go Faster – probably the most informative video I’ve seen lately.

Buck Woody on the PowerShell PowerPack – a set of scripts that help you do stuff.  I haven’t started drinking the PowerShell Kool-Aid yet, but for the folks who like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing they’ll like.

And XKCD illustrated my job in three panels:

My job in three panels

Cloud and Virtualization Articles

Use Your Own Windows Licenses on Amazon EC2 – enterprises can run Windows for the same price as Linux instances now! The only catch is that you have to prove to Amazon that you’re legally licensed.

Dynamic Memory Coming in Hyper-V – VMware vSphere lets virtual machines share memory, which lets them cram more VMs into less hosts.  On a vSphere host with 32 gigs of memory, you can boot up two guests that each have 24 gigs.  Pretty nifty.  Hyper-V doesn’t have that capability, so to compete, they’re adding the ability to dynamically add/remove memory to servers on the fly.  The Windows Virtualization Team wrote a very deep blog post explaining why they didn’t go the page-sharing route that vSphere uses.  I have no opinion on that because SQL Server doesn’t work well with page sharing anyway.

Cloudy with a Chance of Vaporware – vCritical calls out Microsoft’s demo from a year ago. This is an awesome example of why I’m just not psyched about the SQL Server 2008 R2 DAC Pack concept. It doesn’t deliver in R2, as I pointed out in August, and I don’t believe in building something based on promises of what might come – because it might not.

vSphere Designs for IBM Blades – what I want you to take away from this is that designing virtual machines for high availability isn’t all that different from designing SQL Servers for high availability.  There’s a lot of moving parts involved, and you have to make the right design choices.  The payoff by doing it in the VM level, though, is that you do it once and you’ve got HA for everything virtual, not just SQL Servers.  To learn more about that, listen to the Virtumania podcast on disaster recovery.  (I’ll be appearing on that podcast in the not-so-distant future!)

Partition Alignment in Virtual Machines – a subject database administrators know and love comes to the virtualization world.

Writing and Presenting Articles

60 Writing Tips from 6 Great Writers – starting with Thomas Mann saying, “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

Using Twitter During Presentations – Tom LaRock used tools to automatically tweet during his recent presentation, and he talks about how it went.

Fear and Loathing in the Blogosphere – Lori Edwards writes an original article about plagiarism.

Lean Publishing: A Book is a Startup – I followed these same guidelines when I started working on my Simple Twitter Book.

How I Make a Living – Scott Berkun writes, speaks, and consults, and he shares his business model in this post.

The Junk Drawer

How to Disappear in America Without a Trace – laughably serious, and seriously impractical, but a fun read.

3.14 = PIE – get ready to have your mind blown.

I’m back from Microsoft and off to hit the road again, spreading the good word about SQL Server.  Make that two good words – the first one is training, and the second one is free.  Here’s where to find me over the coming weeks.  If you’re nice, I’ll let you play with my new iPad.  If you’re not nice, I’ll spank you with it.  Either way, we both win.

April 17 – SQLSaturday Chicago

SQLSaturday is a free day-long event with all kinds of community speakers. I’m excited to say I’ve applied to be one of the speakers! Kevin Kline and I will be doing the keynote, and I’m doing two other sessions:

BLITZ! 60 Minute Server Takeovers

You’re minding your own business in your corner office – well, no, you’re a DBA, so it’s just your cubicle – when somebody says, “Did you know about this SQL Server over here?” Suddenly, you have to find out what the server’s doing, how it was set up, and whether things are working correctly.

In this all-demo session, Brent will take over a SQL Server and show you:

• How to quickly assess a server’s health using a set of scripts
• How to catch dangerous development issues that will haunt you later
• How to quickly put some basic measures into place to minimize your risk

Perfmon and Profiler 101

These two tools are the key to successful performance tuning. I’ll show you how to get started with these tools, how to slice and dice the results, and even how to data mine the results to look for interesting trends. Whether you like to monitor performance with native tools or third party utilities, knowing how the native tools work will help you get better results out of your tools.

Attendees will learn:

• Why Perfmon is like a Nissan GT-R’s dashboard
• What Perfmon counters to measure, and what they mean
• Four common performance symptoms and how to cure the problems

April 21-23 – PASS Europe in Germany:
Performance Tuning for Race Car Drivers

Times are tough even for the best drivers: Helio Castroneves is dancing for money and Danica Patrick is doing ads for what appears to be an adult services company. Maybe it’s time to switch careers, and Brent has just the thing. Use your hard-earned knowledge of high speeds, million-dollar hardware and surviving disastrous crashes to become a SQL Server performance tuner!

In this session, Brent will show you:

• Why Colin Chapman would check for indexes before adding new ones
• The importance of well-tested safety gear to performance tuning
• Why not monitoring your servers is like overdriving your headlights
• Just like races are lost in the pits, uptime records are lost during maintenance windows

Register for the PASS Europe summit. (This one isn’t free, unfortunately.)

April 26 – PASS London Chapter:
SQL Server Internals and Troubleshooting

Get a first-hand look inside the newly published “Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting” with an interactive discussion with three of the authors Brent Ozar, SQL Server MVP, Quest Software; Justin Langford, Coeo and James Rowland-Jones, Advisory Practice Consultant, EMC Consulting.

The book is packed with real-world examples of ways to effectively use troubleshooting tools and tips like:

• The lifecycle of a query to establish an understanding of the fundamental concepts and architectures
• Memory including physical components, Windows memory management, and SQL Server’s own memory architecture
• SQL Server wait types and how to monitor them with Extended Events
• Knowledge to confidently specify and monitor your storage performance requirements
  SQL Server’s locking model, the internal use of latches, and row versioning

Register to attend in London for free. Attendees will have the opportunity to personally meet with the authors and even have a chance to win one of several copies of their book that we’ll give out at the event.

April 29 – Webcast: Virtualization and SAN Basics for DBAs

These two technologies can make a very big – and very bad – difference in how your SQL Server performs. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get the real, honest lowdown from a virtualization administrator, a SAN administrator, and a DBA? Wouldn’t it be even better if one person had done all three, and could give you the pros and cons of each point of view? That person is Brent Ozar, a Microsoft Certified Master who’s been there and done that.

Learn three things you should NEVER do when virtualizing SQL Server, three things you should ALWAYS do when using SQL Server on a SAN, and three metrics you should always capture on every SQL Server whether it’s virtual or SAN-connected or none of the above. Brent will cover some of the storage troubleshooting techniques from Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting.

Register to attend the webcast.

May 20 – 24 Hours of PASS Webcasts:
Blitz! SQL Server Takeovers

You’re minding your own business in your corner office – well, no, you’re a DBA, so it’s just your cubicle – when somebody says, “Did you know about this SQL Server over here?” Suddenly, you have to find out what the server’s doing, how it was set up, and whether things are working correctly.

In this all-demo session, Brent will take over a SQL Server and show you:

• How to quickly assess a server’s health using a set of scripts
• How to catch dangerous development issues that will haunt you later
• How to quickly put some basic measures into place to minimize your risk

Register to attend my session at 7AM Eastern, 11AM GMT.

June 7-10 – TechEd North America, New Orleans
The Top 10 Developer Mistakes That Won’t Scale

You’ve heard it before: “It worked fine on my machine, but the users say it’s too slow.” Don’t blame the developers: they’re using SQL Server features that look great on paper, but in reality, they won’t scale up to production loads. Learn to recognize these common mistakes before they go into production, and be armed with easy fixes for:

• User-defined functions that go through too much data
• Triggers that perform business logic
• Cursors that process data row by row

Can’t make it out to see me live?

Check out the Day with the DMVs sessions with me and Kevin Kline.  It’s all available online in high definition for free.

When I got done writing just two chapters in Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting, I swore I’d never write another book again. No way. I tweeted that the authoring process was like punching yourself in the junk as hard as you could while editors stood behind you asking you to punch harder and faster.

The Simple Twitter Book

But whaddya know….

This book is completely different, though, and v1 is more of a booklet than a book.  While I was on a week-long Caribbean cruise with my mom, I decided to bang out a short ebook covering as much as I could about Twitter. My Twitter articles get tens of thousands of hits per month, and I figured these kinds of people would love to read an ebook all about getting started with Twitter.  When I walked off the plane after the cruise, I would call the book Version 1.0 and be done with it.  I’d publish it online, give it away for free, and see how it goes.

The result is The Simple Twitter Book, a free 24-page PDF that covers:

• Why your location and description really matters
• Why you shouldn’t change your photo willy-nilly
• How to build a more-information page and a better background
• Where to find cool people to follow
• Why you shouldn’t follow everybody who follows you
• How to reply, retweet, and send direct messages
• The best tools to share links, photos, and music
• How companies can get started with Twitter
• How to get more followers

You, dear reader, already know everything in it, but if you agree with what’s in it, the best thing you can do for me is get the word out.  Send the link to your friends, tweet about it, or email a copy to somebody who’s trying to learn Twitter.  You can download it now.

On Twitter, several SAN pros were saying their snapshots can pull off some nifty stuff.  Well, it’s time to find out just how true that is.

Let’s say we have a data warehouse with:

• One 2TB database, using SQL Server partitioning – needs 8 data files and 1 log file
• One 200GB database for reporting – has 1 data file and 1 log file
• 5 smaller 20GB configuration databases – each with 1 data file and 1 log file
• TempDB – eight data files and one log file

My business needs for backups are:

• Back up any of the databases individually, at any time, with snapshots
• Back up the 5 smaller 20GB databases with transaction log point-in-time recovery abilities
• Sync any of the databases over the WAN to a second SAN
• Be able to restore any of the databases individually to the snapshot, and be able to restore any of the smaller databases to a point in time

The question is:

• How many LUNs do I need to accomplish that goal?
• Is the backup process completely automated without scripting?  (Meaning, if the customer has to roll their own scripts, is there any examples you can point to?)
• What makes/models of the SAN support it?

If your SAN can do it, I’d love to hear about it.  You can email me directly, or post the responses here in comments.

You’re minding your own business in your corner office—well, since you’re a DBA, it’s just your cubicle—when somebody asks, “Did you know about this SQL Server over here?” Suddenly, you have to find out what the server’s doing, how it was set up, and whether things are working correctly.

On May 20th at 7AM Eastern, 11AM GMT, I’ll give you the answer in my “BLITZ! Server Takeovers” session at the 24 Hours of PASS.

In this all-demo session, you’ll see how to take over a SQL Server and:

• Quickly assess a server’s health using a set of scripts
• Catch dangerous development issues that will haunt you later
• Save yourself hours – maybe days – of troubleshooting
• Quickly put some basic measures into place to minimize your risk

This year’s 24 Hours of PASS includes speakers from all over the world – it’s international – so I’m calling it the 24iHOP.  I’m the very last session, and they didn’t save the best for last, either – some of the other sessions include Donald Farmer showing PowerPivot, Kevin Kline on the mistakes you’re making right now, and Adam Machanic on DMVs.

You can register for my session now free, and check out the full session list.