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Month: May 2009

Meet the #SQLPass Hypervisors

Brent Ozar
#SQLPass
5 Comments
I got an awesome group of responses for the initial PASS Virtualization Virtual Chapter.  I wish I could have taken everybody, but you know what happens when you have a committee with too many people: nothing gets done.  (Come to think of it, nothing gets done on committees period…) Meet the Hypervisors, also known as…
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SSWUG Virtual Conference Best of Show

Brent Ozar
4 Comments
Holy mackerel. Turns out you folks really liked my “Log Shipping to the Cloud with Amazon EC2 and S3” session at the SSWUG Virtual Conference this season.  Based on attendance and survey feedback, I won the Best of Show award in the DBA track. Lightning even struck twice: my Reaching Compliance with SQL Server 2008…
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Brent’s Backup Bottleneck: MSDB

Brent Ozar
31 Comments
Backup speed isn’t the sexiest thing DBAs spend time on during the day. It’s kind of boring. Backups don’t complain that they’re not running fast enough.  Users, those are the ones who complain: “My query’s not fast enough.  Why can’t I do a cross join between data warehouse tables?”  The squeaky wheel gets the lube,…
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PASS Virtualization Virtual Chapter

Brent Ozar
#SQLPass, Virtualization
1 Comment
The Professional Association for SQL Server has a few Virtual Chapters.  Formerly known as Special Interest Groups (SIGs), these are groups where people with similar interests can get together and talk shop.  It’s like that Furry group you belong to, only different.  Or maybe not so different. I’m starting up a Virtualization Virtual Chapter: a…
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ServerFault.com – Like StackOverflow, but for IT

Brent Ozar
7 Comments
I hate forums and newsgroups.  I can’t do a better job of explaining why than Tom LaRock did in his post Why I Dislike Newsgroups, including this bullet point list: It takes too long to get an answer, especially if you need an answer quickly. Sometimes, people are quite rude. Most times, the answers are…
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BrentOzar.com Now Available on Amazon Kindle

Brent Ozar
9 Comments
Amazon Kindle owners: would you pay $2 per month to read my blog on your Kindle? It’s not a theoretical question.  Amazon now lets anyone publish their blog to the Kindle, so I submitted my own blog. Amazon picks the price (free is not an option) and gives the blogger 30% of that.  They set…
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Plagiarism, Contracts, and You

Brent Ozar
Blogging
0
It was bound to happen sooner or later, and this week, it did: SQLServerPedia got its first complaint about plagiarism.  We were contacted by a well-known author (we’ll call him Author #1) and his publishing firm who had noticed a disturbing similarity between a chapter in their book and a group of SQLServerPedia wiki articles.…
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Blogging and Obscene Humor

Brent Ozar
Blogging
1 Comment
In person, I work blue.  I focus on keeping my act clean when I’m wearing a tie or addressing a large group of professionals, but I do have to concentrate.  Get me in a smaller, more relaxed group, and I use my native tongue – which should probably get another layer of soap. In emails,…
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Starting a Data Warehouse PASS Virtual Chapter

Brent Ozar
#SQLPass
4 Comments
The Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) has several sub-groups for specialized groups of people: Application Developers – people who code applications that store data in SQL Server. Auditing and Compliance – people who need to secure their SQL Servers and be compliant with regulations. Business Intelligence – people who write reports, design cubes, and…
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How to Telecommute: Getting Things Done

Brent Ozar
4 Comments
No matter what your job description says, you are being paid to get things done. Getting Things Done Being a successful salaried information worker is different than it was a few years ago.  Constant connectivity, home offices and global workforces change everything. You are never – NEVER – going to be “caught up.” You are…
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How to Telecommute: Status Reports

Brent Ozar
5 Comments
Hold on, stay with me for a second. I know what you’re thinking: the only thing more boring than status reports is reading a BLOG about status reports. My Typical Blog Reader My weekly status reports are different.  They’re just a few short, simple lines in a Monday morning email like this: Last week I:…
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Microsoft TechEd 2009 Keynote Liveblog

Brent Ozar
3 Comments
At today’s Microsoft TechEd 2009 conference in LA, Senior VP Bill Veghte started by talking about big-picture needs.  He discussed focusing Microsoft’s R&D on the ability to deliver anywhere access with end-user centricity: the ability for mobile users on laptops and PDAs to access applications securely and with IT control. Office 2010 and SQL Server…
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Hackintosh Fail

Brent Ozar
9 Comments
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to build a cheap, fast and reliable Hackintosh: a home-built desktop capable of running Apple Mac OSX. You can read the story over at the Houston Chronicle’s TechBlog, where Dwight Silverman let me post as a guest blogger.  It also got picked up on Digg, MacSurfer…
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How to Telecommute: Staying Motivated

Brent Ozar
5 Comments
Once you’ve gotten a telecommuting job like I explained yesterday, it can be tough to stay motivated and get things done.  There’s so many temptations.  Today, I’ll talk about some of the ways I stay focused and productive. Set Your Working Hours by Your Body Clock 8am to 5pm probably isn’t your natural peak time. …
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How to Build a Silent PC

Brent Ozar
3 Comments
My computer has to be nearly silent because I use it to record video podcasts about SQL Server. I can’t have a big whirring fan noise in the background while I’m recording.  Normally I use a Macbook Pro, which is completely silent, but as part of my Hackintosh experiment I tried to build a silent…
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