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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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