I bought a Microsoft Zune 8 to test the new SQLServerPedia video podcasts and the user experience was so unpolished, so unprofessional that I just had to bang out a blog about it. Looking at the iPod Nano next to the Zune 8, I could never understand why somebody would buy the Zune 8. Now having used both of them, it makes even less sense.
Stephen Wynkoop blogged about social networking as a part of the hiring process. I'll sum it up in a line: like it or not, you are being Googled when you submit your resume. Get over it.
Would you buy a car without searching for an online review? Sure, some people do - otherwise the dismal Chrysler Sebring would never sell a copy. If you haven't read Jeremy Clarkson's review of the Chrysler Sebring, go do it, because it'll brighten your day with gems like this:
Dear Coworker,
Hi. I work differently than other people you may have worked with. I wanna take a minute to bring you up to speed on how I do it, and what this might mean for you.
Robert X. Cringely is a columnist for PBS - you know, the worldwide authority on hot information technology issues. You might recognize some of their other experts like Norm Abrams and Big Bird. Cringely's just like them, only with less name recognition.
In his latest blog, Cringely explains how cloud computing is going to make databases disappear altogether. Cloud services are going to be so fast that traditional things like SQL Server and Oracle won't matter anymore.
Database administrators: are you backing up your SQL Servers to local drives? If so, you need to stop for a minute to think about a few possible side effects, and maybe think about backing up to a network share instead. Why? I'm glad you asked!
Get your data off the server faster
Storage is a black box, right? The SAN admins ask how much storage space you need, you tell them, and then they give it to you. They don't tell you how fast (or slow) it is, they don't know whether it meets your needs, and they probably don't know where the bottlenecks are. It's time…
Jason Massie and Brent Ozar work with SQL Server for a living and write blogs for fun, but that’s where the similarities end. Jason’s a fan of shared storage SANs: putting SQL Server data and logs on the same set of physical hard drives. Brent’s a cheerleader for dedicated configurations where the arrays are separated…
Got more than one DBA? Want to make your life easier? You might want to configure a Central Management Server.
This is useful for fast-changing shops where there's a lot of servers added and removed. At my last company, we had a hard enough time telling everybody when we'd finished adding a new server, or what the new server's name was, or when we didn't need to look at a server anymore.
A reader wrote in and asked: We're running SQL Server with blades and a NetApp SAN. We have a few hundred databases from 100mb to 200gb. All data, logs, tempdb, etc. are located in the same 30-disk pool. Apparently this was setup using NetApp's guidelines. NetApp recommendations are to put everything in one aggregate, or…
Say we have a physical database server sitting over there in the rack. For the sake of discussion, let's pretend it's a slightly older model, a HP DL380 G2 with a couple of P3 CPUs, 4gb of ram, and six local 36gb drives. The storage is broken up into a mirrored pair of drives for…
Here's my favorite SQL Server books for 2016-2014:
T-SQL Fundamentals - (updated for SQL 2016) - don't be fooled by this "fundamentals" title, because everybody who writes T-SQL queries needs this book. It's the manual we should have been given when we started, and everyone's going to learn something about concurrency, performance, and updates here.
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 has been released, and the release date was Wednesday, August 6. Awesome - less than three years since SQL 2005, thereby meeting their goals and keeping the whole Software Assurance benefits worth the money.
You can download it now if you've got an MSDN subscription - those are a great deal at around $300 per year.
Jason Massie (aka StatisticsIO.com) wrote a blog post this week called The Death of the DBA. He talks about why the coming cloud computing craze creates career chaos. I have the exact opposite opinion: I can't wait for databases to move toward the cloud because it makes database administrators even more vital. Reason #1: Cloud…
OdinJobs.com interviewed eight different DBAs from completely different backgrounds and careers. The one thing we've got in common is that we blog, but outside of that, we've got wildly different points of view about the career and what we like about SQL Server.
I shall now copy/paste Jason Massie's hard work at listing each person's blog URL and feed, because I have no shame:
The Microsoft knowledge base article on SQL Server virtualization support just got an update. Here's the interesting part:
"Versions of SQL Server after SQL Server 2005 will incorporate full support for running on a supported guest operating system that is installed on a Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V virtual machine."
If you're using AMD Phenom 3-core processors, SQL Server 2005 won't install without going through some hoops first. Microsoft just published a knowledge base article on SQL 2005 errors on 3 and 6 core servers.
I don't usually blog about knowledge base articles, but I got such a laugh out of that one that I just had to share it.
I'm spending a few days in St. Petersburg, Russia to visit Quest's office. Sure, I have the regular touristy photos, like myself in front of old buildings:
But what I really like about overseas travel is that everything looks and feels different, and it forces me to look at the design and user interface for everything.
When SQL 2005 was in beta, I clapped my hands and jumped for joy the first time I played with partitioning. I've done a lot of data warehouse work, and partitioning lets the DBA break down massive tables into smaller, easy-to-manage chunks. We can put heavily accessed parts of the table onto fast storage, and…
I got a question from Ron G asking how to go about changing positions from help desk to DBA. Here's my thoughts: Build on what you already know. If you're used to working on IBM AIX systems, for example, you'll want to utilize some of that skillset by working with databases that run on AIX. …
I have a new job, and lemme just tell you, it feels like my whole career has prepared me for this one. I spent several years at UniFocus, a hospitality software company that relied on SQL Server. I honed my SQL skills, but probably more importantly, I managed a small team of programmers. I worked…
