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.

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts

All kinds of webcasts and presentations coming up in the next couple of weeks:

May 14 – Quest Pain of the Week Webcast:
Developing Something for Nothing

Join SQL Server expert Brent Ozar and SQL Server developer Jeremiah Peschka in this webcast, as they discuss the free tools available to you to build solid, robust applications for free. They will cover:

• SQL Server Express Edition – the free version of SQL Server
• SQL Server Management Studio Express – the free way to manage your Express Edition instances
• Toad® Freeware – the free Toad resource to manage your SQL Servers (including Express) as well as your MySQL instances

Don’t miss the overview of the free tools you can’t afford to ignore in tough economic times! In this presentation, you’ll see how to improve your productivity with an intuitive, graphical tool that will satisfy your growing SQL Server development needs.  Register for the free webcast.

May 14 – Columbus, OH PASS Chapter
Using Cloud-Based BI to Interpret Perfmon & Profiler Results

After learning how to use Perfmon and Profiler to gather performance statistics about your SQL Server, it still takes a lot of time to interpret those results and figure out what’s going on.  Microsoft’s SQL Server Data Mining team has built a free cloud-based data mining tool for Excel that can help slice and dice mountains of data and help you make sense of it all.

Even if you’re not ready for BI in the cloud, you can use this same type of tool in combination with a local SQL Server Analysis Services instance.  Wait!  Don’t freak out – it’s much easier than you think, and you never have to leave the comforting environment of Excel.  Even if this doesn’t sound like fun to you, you might want to learn about it because mid-level managers in your company might want to use this technique to analyze sales or customer data.

Attendees will learn how to install & configure data mining in Excel, how to analyze Perfmon data to break the server’s load into categories, and how to use BI to write a performance report about your SQL Server.

This one will be presented remotely, and we’ll tweet out links as we get closer to the presentation.

May 19 – PASS Application Development SIG – Online
Rolling Your Own Replication

SQL Server’s built-in replication has made great strides in the last couple of versions, but what if it’s still not enough?  One team needed more flexibility, easier administration and higher scalability, so they built their own solution instead.  Brent Ozar will discuss how the system was designed, the pros and cons, and how you can build a similar solution for your own needs.  He’ll explain some of the lessons learned in scaling this out to thousands of remote SQL Servers.

The meeting starts at 1pm.  You can watch the webcast online, and for the audio, call 1-866-379-8990, passcode 6489756.  After joining, please mute your phone.

May 19 – IndyPASS – Indianapolis, IN
SAN Multipathing: You CAN Get There From Here

SANs are expensive pieces of hardware that offer a lot of performance and failure protection.  The key is multipathing, yet DBAs rarely get exposed to it.  Brent knows firsthand: he managed data warehouses and SAN storage, and was able to wring much more performance out of his SANs when he learned multipathing.  He’ll explain the basics of multipathing, how to test for failover protection, and how to configure your storage to get the most performance possible from your investment.

The meeting is at 3500 DePauw Blvd., Pyramid #3 – Lower Level, Indianapolis, IN 46268.   I’ll be doing this one online via my Ustream channel if all goes well.  More info via Twitter on the day of the presentation.

May 27 – Converging Paths of SQL and SharePoint
Microsoft Office, Victoria London

I’m not doing this one myself, but whenever Quest does a SharePoint/SQL event, it’s always very popular so I thought I’d mention it here.  This will be a full day-long seminar with sessions on:

• The SQL Server –SharePoint connection
• Creating a scalable and resilient architecture
• DBAs as SharePoint Administrators
• Understanding and managing SharePoint

The speakers include:

• Andrew Fryer, SQL Server Evangelist, Microsoft
• Viral Tapara, SharePoint Evangelist, Microsoft
• Christian Bolton, SQL Server MVP and Director/Database Architect, Coeo Ltd.
• Doug Davis, Director of Product Management, SharePoint, Quest Software
• Iain Kick, SQL Server Systems Consultant, Quest Software

You can register for the day-long seminar here, and it’ll be available as a webcast too.

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

I remember my first SharePoint administration work.  When I started at Southern Wine as a DBA, I had a ton of application databases to manage, and one of them was a SharePoint database.  The Project Management Office had started using SharePoint Services to hold stuff, and they’d really started piling it on – documents, project plans, pictures, you name it, all stored in SQL Server.  It made me cringe – files don’t belong in the database, I said.  It was too late, though.

I just backed it up like any other application database: full backups nightly, transaction logs every 15 minutes, made the Sign of the Cross when I walked past the server, the usual stuff.  (I’m a recovering Catholic.)

One day, it happened.  Somebody called to say they’d deleted a document out of SharePoint and they needed it back immediately.

I’m a DBA.  I think of recovery in terms of databases, tables and rows.  If somebody says they deleted a row, usually they’re a developer, and they know things like the exact database and table name, plus the primary key of the record.  I restore the database to another location, pull the row out via a query, and insert it into the live production database.  Emergency solved.

SharePoint, that’s another animal entirely.  The user is just a panicked end user, nothing more, who says things like, “I can’t remember exactly what the document was called, but it’s the one that’s gone now!  Go find it!”

Awww, man, come on…

More and more, more of us DBAs are getting stuck in this situation.  We’re being told that SharePoint is ours to manage, ours to back up and most painfully, ours to recover when something goes wrong.  To prepare for that, Joel Oleson (aka SharepointJoel.com) and I are doing a webcast on February 19th called Effective Backup and Restore Strategies for Your SharePoint Service.  We’re going to cover how to go from chaos to smooth sailing using the native tools as well as Quest’s SharePoint stuff like Recovery Manager.

Joel does the same thing at Quest Software that I do, except he’s in the SharePoint team.  He’s well-known in the SharePoint world, he’s writing an upcoming O’Reilly book on SharePoint, and he’s on Twitter as JoelOleson.

You can register for the SharePoint backup & recovery webcast, and if that one sounds interesting to you, we’ve got several other upcoming SharePoint webcasts as well.  You can find ‘em on the Quest Events list – choose SharePoint in the Technologies dropdown box.  You can also switch to the Webcast Archives tab and view a bunch of past webcasts we’ve done on SharePoint.

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