Blog

Tired of reading about the PASS elections?  Here’s some links to clear your head:

SQL Server Links

Inside the Optimiser: Constructing a Plan – Paul White is writing some of the best SQL Server blog posts I’ve read in a long, long time. The guy is just on fire.  This four-part series is gold.

Does Join Order Matter – Microsoft’s Conor Cunningham is *the* guy when it comes to execution plans, and he says no.

Hit and Miss – Gail Shaw covers how to use Profiler to watch procedure cache hits and misses.

Finding Key Lookups in Cached Execution Plans – the procedure cache stores execution plans in memory, and you can search the XML of these plans to find interesting performance tuning opportunities.  Kendal Van Dyke explains how.

The Cost of SQL Azure Indexes – Azure charges by the month, by how much you store.  That means every index you add costs you real money, and you can determine exactly how much.

SQL Server 2008 Diagnostic Queries – Glenn “DMV-a-Day” Berry shares a script that’s like my Blitz server takeover script, but even more advanced.  Love it!

New Sysinternals Tool: RAMMap – does what it shows on the label, so it might help you track down where your memory is going.

Virtualization and Cloud Links

Change Your Hyper-V Guest CD Inside the Guest – Love this tool idea from Simon Sabin.

VMware vSphere 4.1 out – vCritical says vSphere is the best virtualization platform available and gives reasons why. The docs in the “In-Depth Virtualization Platform Comparisons” are helpful.

vSphere on NetApp Best Practices – updated document on how to manage your virtual machine storage.

Amazon CloudFront default root object – Amazon S3 is a file hosting service for the cloud, and CloudFront is their geographically load balanced caching system to make visitors everywhere load your site faster. Now you can host an entire static HTML site inside CloudFront by specifying a default root object like index.html. If you’re going to build the next Trololo, this is how you host it.

The Junk Drawer

Hiding Computer Cables in Rain Gutters – for a clean and cheap home office design.

How Did Your Life Change After FU Money? – Hacker News asked what really happens after you become rich.  The comments are really insightful – at first, people commented that they wished they didn’t have to shop, do laundry, clean the house, etc, and then others pointed out that those services are available right now really inexpensively.  How much money do you really need to be happy?

Apple’s New iTV Will Change Everything! – I’m not buyin’ it (again) just yet.  We rented a HD movie last night through our Apple TV, which I do love, but Comcast’s craptastic up/down bandwidth failed out halfway through the movie.  Us geeks will tolerate that every now and then.  My family won’t.  And for the record, it was Babies, and you should watch it. Adorable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVYszQrKo9g

Three Sites You Should Be Reading

Hacker News – like Digg or Slashdot used to be before they got popular and sucked.  Hacker News is user-moderated stories that focus on topics that interest me personally.

Sniff Petrol – British humor about the car business, mostly focused on F1.  Example from last week: “General Motors this week applied for permission to hold a garage sale in order to raise the money it needs to support itself.”

Internet Movie DataBase (IMDB) – whenever I’m down and I need a laugh, I search for my favorite movie and read the quotes.  Last week I was reading up on my favorite Grosse Point Blank quotes.  They’re a little unsafe for work if you’re not the swearing kind.