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.
