Here’s my bookmarked links for October 26th through October 30th:

SQL Server Links

• Windows Azure Platform Launch Update – The blog notes that “a number of new features in Windows Azure will be made available for the first time” – but it’s at PDC, not the Professional Association for SQL Server Summit. This should be your clue that cloud-based SQL Server isn’t targeted at DBAs, folks – it’s targeted at developers.
• Don’t be a DBA – Be a Data Professional – Buck Woody explains that your real job isn’t tied to the exact version/edition/brand you’re using – it’s tied to the value you provide.
• SQL University: Diving into Authorization – Do you understand the differences between GRANT, REVOKE and DENY? K. Brian Kelley dives in for SQL University.
• SQL Server with NetApp SAN – Collection of best practices documents from NetApp.
• Checklist for installing SQL Server 2005 as a clustered instance – Your first cluster is painful – get help from Cindy Gross’s simplified checklist.
• How People Abuse Their SQL Server Transaction Log – Things NOT to Do – A laundry list of SQL Server abuses.
• Merrill Aldrich : Using Historical Perf Counter Data For Storage Planning – Dives into some of the cool metrics you can get from the Quest Spotlight repositories.
• Suggested Max Memory Settings for SQL Server 2005/2008 – I like hard-coding the maximum memory size for SQL Server whenever it’s not being shared with multiple applications. Glenn shows you some guidelines for the right numbers.
• SQL University: Authentication and Authorization – K. Brian Kelly talks about his specialty – making sure your data stays yours.
• Amazon EC2 – Now an Even Better Value – Amazon’s prices are lower now for SQL Server in the cloud.
• SSMS Tools Pack 1.7 is out! New feature: SQL Snippets – Great free tool.
• Deterministic Functions – Steve Jones talks about how to determine whether something’s deterministic – it affects caching of execution plans, too.
• Developing Data-tier Applications Using Visual Studio 2010 – Video showing off what’s coming for DBAs long term.
• Templates for New Query Window – Buck Woody shows how to force yourself into commenting your code better.
• High Availability Improvements in SharePoint 2010 – Woohoo! It’ll support SQL Server database mirroring out of the box.
• Introducing Amazon RDS – The Amazon Relational Database Service – MySQL in the cloud, cheap.

#SQLPASS Links

• Starting the Travel Tips Meme – Great tips from Kevin Kline for the upcoming PASS summit.
• What Should PASS Strive To Be? – Jack Corbett’s thoughts on #SQLPASS’s directions.
• A Rendezvous With Destiny: PASS 2009 (#sqlpass) – If you’re going to the PASS Summit, you need to watch Jimmy May speak.

Tech Links

• Losing Net Neutrality: The Worst Case Scenario [Net Neutrality] – If you don’t understand the talk around “net neutrality”, this post will illustrate how the net will look like if we don’t have net neutrality.
• VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 1 – The Basics – Thin provisioning involves creating storage arrays without actually having as much storage as you think. Doing it right requires some awareness at the OS level.
• ScreenFlow 2.0: top Mac screen recording app gets even better – This is the tool I use for my podcasts and screencasts.
• Motorola DROID review – Engadget’s review of the highly awaited Android headset. Comes out with more cons than I’d have expected.
• Free Public Careers CVs – This is going to change the way geeks get hired.
• Announcing Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 – Free turn-by-turn navigation for Android phones. Interesting because Google is basically competing against the iPhone on price now – rather than paying for turn-by-turn nav, you can get an Android phone and get that for free.
• Dunbar’s Number isn’t just a number, it’s the law – Humans can’t handle having more than 150 friends.
• Now Available: The Virtual Storage Console vSphere Plug-in – If you manage VMware and you have a NetApp SAN, this lets you get better insight into your virtual server storage from inside VMware tools.

The Junk Drawer

• Newspaper circulation chart over the last 20 years – What a cliff. Scroll down.
• I Got Nowhere To Go – Tom LaRock questions why people are starting up all kinds of new sites that do the same thing as ones that are already popular & successful.
• Best Buy drops the price on the Netflix-streaming, Blu-ray playing Insignia Blu-ray player – $100 for a Blu-ray player is one heck of a breakthrough price.
• Book Review: Twitter Wit – Tom LaRock reviews a book with tweets.
• The Power of Being Personal on Your Blog – Wanna know why you should be personal? Ask a blogger who’s already been wildly successful.
• Which Religion Should I Follow? – Flowchart to pick your Jeebus.
• Caffeine & Edibles : Baconnaise – Man, if only there was some way I could get both bacon and mayo on my sandwich faster….ah-ha!

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.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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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.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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Here’s my bookmarked links for September 25th through October 2nd:

SQL Server, Cloud, and Tech Links

• Viva la Famiglia! – Brad Schulz shows how to use T-SQL to determine family relations. This is freakin’ awesome.
• PASS Board 2009 Slate of Candidates – Candidates are Brian Moran, Jeremiah Peschka, Matt Morollo and Thomas LaRock.
• PASS Elections and UStream | SQLRockstar – Tom LaRock is on the ballot again this year for the PASS Board of Directors, and you can ask him questions live in a video chat.
• Vote for Mr. LaRock – Grant Fritchey, author of SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Distilled, endorses Tom LaRock for PASS Board.
• Off-Hours Work: A Guide For Managers – If you have to rally the troops to work after hours, here’s how to do it with minimal morale loss.
• Interview with Kevin Kline – Tom LaRock interviews the former president of PASS.
• One Million Pageviews – StackOverflow hits the one-million-pageviews-per-day milestone. And yes, the back end is just one single SQL Server on relatively cheap commodity hardware with local disks, not SAN.
• HOW TO: Get Started with Google Wave – I think I’m the only guy who’s not jumping up and down clapping about Wave. I think it’s technically awesome, but it doesn’t solve challenges that I can’t solve right now with other methods. I’m going to ride this one out (get it – ride – wave – okay, maybe not) and wait a couple of months to see if it has staying power. (This from a guy who signed up for Twitter the instant he saw it years ago.)
• ROI from MCM: A look back 6 months later. – A Microsoft Certified Master talks about the changes it’s had on his billing rates and negotiations.
• YES WE CAN!!! – Jen McCown’s announcement about winning the SQLServerPedia Dream Trip contest. Very cool.
• DPM 2010 Beta is available now – Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager is a very different way of backing up your databases (among many other things) and I’m interested to see what they brought in this new release. Says “can backup SQL servers with ~700-800 DBs” – makes me wonder what that bottleneck is.
• The ABCs of Management Studio Shortcuts – List of keyboard shortcuts for SSMS. Control+I is a neat trick.
• The old INNER JOIN syntax vs. the new INNER JOIN syntax – I got lucky – I started with the “new” syntax years ago and never looked back. It’s way better.
• Sessions for new DBAs at PASS – Bill Graziano suggests which sessions make sense for first-time attendees and new DBAs.
• Free Training in October at the Quest Connect vConference – Kevin Kline and I will be doing presentations and taking questions in our booth.
• Pre-Compiled Stored Procedures: Fact or Myth – Grant Fritchey plays Mythbuster.
• Inside Amazon’s Cloud: Just How Many Customer Projects? – An analyst estimated customers are launching 50,000 virtual servers a day on Amazon EC2.
• SQL Management Pack Survey – Live on Connect – Use Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (the artist formerly known as MOM)? Now’s your chance to influence development of the SQL Server management pack.
• Google Docs OCR – Another example of how cloud computing changes everything. The more we move services like this into the cloud, the more we can find creative uses for the data.
• Strong Password Generator – Uses T-SQL code to generate strong passwords. Interesting example.
• Consolidation Planning – Mike Hillwig is looking for feedback on his server setups.
• 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines – Lots of “ah-ha” moments about how to make your web site look better and attract more permanent visitors.
• SQL Server Best Practices: Guard the Backup Files – You know the deal: the only reason we do backups is so that we can do restores. Buck Woody talks more about it.
• First Look: Zipcar app for iPhone hits the road – Find nearby Zipcars with your iPhone, then unlock them. I gotta play with this now that I’m in a city with Zipcars.
• Windows 7 coming to netbooks in all its myriad forms – YES! We won’t have to put up with the bullshit 3-app “Starter Edition” on netbooks – you can get ‘em with any version of Windows 7.
• Random Gradient Wallpaper Generator – Does just what it says on the box. Windows only though.
• Run Everything Virtualized and Deduplicated : aka Chuck Anti-FUD – Talk about cutting edge – people are talking about running their virtual servers on SANs that are being deduped. That would reduce the storage footprint required for a lot of Windows machines, for example, that all share a lot of the same binaries.
• How do checkpoints work and what gets logged – By Paul Randal.
• No, I will not do your homework for you – When posting forum & StackOverflow questions, think about phrasing them in a way to make sure nobody thinks you’re posting homework assignments.
• SQLIOSim Parser by Jens Suessmeyer & Yours Truly – SQLIOSim pushes load through your SAN storage and can simulate SQL Server IO patterns. However, like SQLIO, the problem is interpreting the results, which get dumped out to text or XML. Now there’s a utility to make it easier.
• Mississippi leads the way: 3 MCM’s a requirement in State IT RFP – Mississippi is requiring Microsoft Certified Masters if a consulting company wants to compete for a particular project. Wow. Just wow.
• Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition and Virtualisation – When you use Enterprise Edition, you can install 4 OS guests for free. Andrew Fryer explains.
• Heard it from a friend who… heard it from a friend who… – Yet another hilarious blog posting from Colin, aka @BenchmarkIT. This guy’s on a roll. This time, he’s talking about a daisy chain of purity check info.
• Toys and Tools – Mike Hillwig’s favorite SQL Server utilities. (And yes, there’s a lot of Quest stuff in there, and no, I didn’t put him up to that.)

Writing, Blogging and Networking Links

• Books or Blogs: My Perspective – Scott Lowe, a published author, talks about whether or not writing books still make sense. I’d add that books force you to a higher level of technical accuracy due to the number of editors you have to get through.
• Tips for Networking at PASS – Great tips on how to meet fellow database administrators and why it can pay off.
• Shirts for Speakers? – Of everything in my closet, my very favorite shirt is my PASSCamp Germany polo with my name monogrammed on it. You could have knocked me over with a feather when Christoph and Oliver gave that to me. It made a huge impression, and I’m still really proud to wear it.
• 9 Ways to Make Your Writing More Compelling – Does what it says on the label.
• Tweet 2001: A Social Media Odyssey – OCDQ – Obsessive-Compulsive Data Quality – A ton of links about how LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social networks can work for data people.

The Junk Drawer

• The 50 most interesting articles on Wikipedia « Copybot – Good way to blow an hour and learn stuff.
• Nine Workspaces Where Famous Folks Get Stuff Done [Workspaces] – Most of these are publicity shots, but they’re still useful to see how people like Steve Ballmer set up their offices.
• Penny Arcade! – The Distinction – What if football was an RPG? Wait – it is! Final Fantasy Football….
• Tokyo Preview: Honda EV-N concept is retro-adorable, has unicycle storage – Please, please build this car. Let the world have an electric car that has some semblance of personality.
• 9 Secrets of Truly Happy People – You don’t become happy by saying “Yes” to people in an effort to make them happy. You have to pay attention to yourself and your own needs too.
• Me, Darth Vader’s brother, Guy Kawasaki and the hijacker from The Usual Suspects. Just, you know, hanging out. – In which The Bloggess comes up with alternate versions of The Little Engine That Could, like “The little engine that can’t take a hint.”
• Eff You, Penguin – Not safe for work – uses funny animal photos with NSFW captions.
• Penny Arcade! – Love Bombs From On High – Jesus loves me, this I know, because he gave me Gyromancer and…

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.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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Good news and bad news – the good news is that everybody’s been going wild and crazy for the SQLServerPedia PASS contest.  The bad news is that editing the articles & setting up the bloggers has eaten up every moment of my spare time, hahaha.  As a result, I had to do the unthinkable this weekend: scan through Google Reader and then hit mark-all-as-read.  Here were the survivors, and I’m sure I missed some good stuff:

• Letting SQL Server Do Your Scheduling – Mike Hillwig explains the pros & cons of doing task scheduling inside SQL Server.
• Using Mirroring to Reduce DB Migration Downtime (Part 2) – Great concept that I discuss in my upcoming SSWUG VC presentation too. If you’re going after high-9s availability, you need to use this technique.
• Who Wants $500? – Tom LaRock and Tim Ford talk about the early-bird discount to the PASS Summit and where to eat when you get there.
• The DR Cloud: An Example | Jason Massie’s Blog – How to do disaster recovery using a cloud-based SQL Server with Terremark.
• A Technical Case Study: Fast and Reliable Backup and Restore of Multi-Terabytes Database over the Network – Whitepapers – Whitepaper from the SQL Server Customer Advisory Team
• CodeSOD: The Ultimate State Selector – Awesome WTF snippet of code. What the hell was this developer thinking…
• Dear Vendor – Mike Hillwig gives a laundry list of things he wishes vendors wouldn’t do with databases.
• BINGO!!! – Colin Stasiuk illustrates the problem with false alarms in a funny way.
• Fun with Locked Pages, AWE, Task Manager, and the Working Set… – More from the PSS team about how SQL Server handles memory.
• What I’ve Read and Recommend to Others – Joe Celko Edition – Reviews of all of Joe’s books.
• Running a Server Side Trace – How to run SQL Server traces without Profiler.
• SQL Pretty Printer Add-In for SSMS – Review – $40 SQL formatter plugin for SSMS.
• Windows Server 2008 R2 – NLBS and VMware – Workaround! – When you pick virtual device drivers in virtualization, it really does matter what you pick.
• Come Learn Some Interesting Stuff about Virtualization – Right Down the Street – Virtualization tour through the US sponsored by the big vendors.

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.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts

Here’s my bookmarked links for August 23rd through August 28th.  I’m using an automatic plugin to build this list, and I can see that this probably isn’t going to work – I just found way too many things interesting in one week, and it doesn’t break stuff out into categories.  Blogger fail.  Here it is anyway as an example of What Not To Do during my Better Blog Week:

• Dual-screen gScreen laptop gets pictured, hopefully launching this year – The screens slide out sideways. This oughta be a whole lot of fun when used in the middle seat of airplanes.
• The Query Optimizer and Parameter Sniffing – A classic SQL Server performance issue illustrated with clear, easy-to-reproduce scripts in AdventureWorks.
• I Love Getting Stuff In The Mail… Thanks @BrentO and Quest Crew!! – Colin got his new SQLServerPedia t-shirt. I love these, and I’m jealous of everybody who got theirs, because I don’t have one yet, hahaha.
• SQL Server State of the Union – Before your annual review, you need to start thinking about how you can justify your cost and your job. Chris’s list of high-level environment status checks is a good place to start.
• eBay Find of the Day: Gorgeous 1964 Lincoln Continental has a 723-hp secret – This, ladies and gentlemen (well, mostly gentlemen), is the reason why the Buy It Now button was invented. And also, the American Express card.
• Yelp for iPhone’s hidden augmented reality feature – Wow – you can “see” restaurants by looking through your iPhone 3GS. This app is already great even without the augmented reality part.
• People of Walmart – Hint: these aren’t the employees. Pictures of random shoppers. Very, very random.
• YouTube – HIGH SPEED NINJA ACTION – It’s fair to say that when the ninjas are wearing roller skates and the lead actor can’t outdrive them, it’s a low-budget flick.
• Top 5 reasons to run for the PASS Board of Directors – By Joe Webb.
• Iomega’s ix4-200d: A Killer Desktop Storage Array – VMware approved, Windows iSCSI approved, and under $1,000 with four drives – this is going to be a barnstormer. I’m buying one as soon as we get to Chicago. Great storage appliance capabilities.
• Come on 64bit so we can leave the mem…. – Microsoft PSS explains the MemToLeave issue on x64 servers, saying there’s no such thing.
• Adding geo-redundancy to failover clustering – Paul Randal discusses the options to add a disaster recovery datacenter option to your SQL Server failover cluster.
• Why isn’t my SharePoint Environment Social??? – Joel Oleson gives 10 ways that you can tell your environment isn’t social enough, and how to fix it.
• PASS Board of Directors Nominations – Tom LaRock (a current PASS Board of Directors member) sends out his call for volunteers and a list of people he’d like to see run, including me, and it ain’t happenin’ this year.
• Clearing the Windows page file and its effect on server performance – If you set up Windows to clear the page file on every boot, stop to think about how big the page file is and how fast your drives are. It could be the slowest thing in your boot process.
• PASS Call for Nominations – Andy Warren (a current PASS Board of Directors member) puts out the call for volunteers.
• SQL Bacon Nugget of Excellence Award @SQLGal – For the Enterprise Policy Framework, an excellent extension to SQL Server 2008′s Policy-Based Management.
• Web Page Analyzer – free website optimization tool website speed test check website performance report from web site optimization – Checks your web site to see where you need to improve performance. Used when I installed W3 Total Cache on my site. The minify and compression options dropped my page size by around 80%.
• The Dilbert Blog: Champagne Moments – Scott Adams talks about why he never cracked open the champagne – he was always worried about the next step.
• Twitter’s Golden Ratio (That No One Likes To Talk About) – You can’t really follow everybody who follows you. As your social network grows, there’s going to be people who follow you that just don’t interest you. This isn’t a bad thing.
• Tac Bac – Tactical Canned Bacon – The only way we’re going to be able to survive the coming zombie onslaught while holed up in our bunkers: Tactical Bacon.
• Solution to Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Data Corruption – I’m not favoriting this because it’s got Quest Toad, but because it’s a really, really, REALLY well-written blog post. If you wanna be creative with a SQL Server blog post series, David Stein shows how it’s done.
• SQL Server SAN Migration – Things to think about when you change your server’s storage.
• Open Windows Firewall Ports for SQL Server the Easy Way – Use scripts to open the Windows Firewall ports without pointing and clicking.
• Treating The Results of a Stored Procedure as a Table Expression – Awesome trick! Take the output of a stored proc into a table without knowing in advance what the output will look like. Genius.
• VMware virtualization – Where do I start? – Good getting-started article on picking your first VMware platform.
• Getting to PASS on the Cheap | Jeremiah Peschka, SQL Server Developer – Want to go to the PASS Summit in Seattle? It’s the best SQL Server learning event I’ve ever attended. Jeremiah shows you how to convince your boss to pay for it.
• Wikipedia To Require Editing Approval – We’re ahead of the curve at SQLServerPedia – we’ve been using the same “flagged revisions” code to have our editors approve changes before they go live. I’d like to think they took a cue from us.
• Made2Manage Lacks Referential Integrity – David Stein talks about an ERP application that doesn’t enforce integrity inside the database. “Trust, but verify.”
• The Rambling DBA: Jonathan Kehayias : Troubleshooting the SQL Server Memory Leak (or Understanding SQL Server Memory Usage) – More about MemToLeave.
• Overview of Gemini features – Screenshots of SQL Server’s new Excel-based client tools for business intelligence.
• PASS Board of Directors – Call for Nominations – Want to help the SQL Server community in a big way? The Professional Association for SQL Server has a Board of Directors that puts in a ton of work to advance community interests. In this post, Steve Jones lays out some suggestions for folks thinking about running. I think it’s a great list.
• Kickstarter – Like micropatronage: sponsor artists to produce projects (music, visual arts, performance, etc) and you get something back from the artist.
• The Great DBA Schism – Rod Colledge lists the different kind of DBA job titles. He’s 100% right. The cloud will change this over time, but not in the very near future.
• Backup Times – Script to show how long a backup will take to finish. (Disclaimer – I haven’t tested this.)
• Let me Show You Inside a Secret Blogging Alliance – Several bloggers banded together to promote each other. The article explains what they did for each other, and how they gained.
• Think Differential Backups Aren’t Worth The Hassle? Think Again Using LiteSpeed for SQL Server! – Whitepaper I wrote about how painful differential backups are, and how you can make them easier with Quest LiteSpeed v5.1′s new SmartDiff. There’s a video of me talking, and I get a chuckle out of that.
• Pain of the Week: Top 10 DMVs for Easier SQL Server Monitoring – Free hour-long webcast by me and Tim Ford about how to use SQL Server’s Dynamic Management Views to monitor your server.
• ALL, ANY, and SOME: The Three Stooges – Brad Schulz explains the rarely used SQL operators ALL, ANY and SOME. (No, I’d never used them either.)
• PASS Update #13 – Andy Warren discusses changes to the PASS Board of Directors election process. This time, the Board members will be elected prior to the PASS Summit.
• xkcd – A Webcomic – Tech Support Cheat Sheet – Show your friends, family, and neighbors how to be their own computer expert and stop calling you.
• Wibiya – Really slick-looking toolbar that sits at the bottom of your blog and shows info from comments, Twitter, Facebook and more. They’re in private beta, but I signed up for it after I saw it on another blogger’s site.

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.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts