Blog

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.