Blog

The holidays are a time for giving back, and several of us are giving back to the community this year by recognizing some of the best blog posts of 2010.

On Thursday the 9th, Jeremiah Peschka (Blog – Twitter) will kick things off with his favorite blog post of 2010.  He’ll tag another blogger who will share their favorite, and so on.  That’s all well and good, but before they get started, I’d like to share some of my favorite posts by those bloggers.

Jeremiah Peschka on going to work for Quest – my former managers will be quick to tell you that Jeremiah took over my budget, not my job, and they’re right, but I was excited to see that Quest was still committed to the database community.  I wanted to learn more about NoSQL, but I decided not to go that way in my career, and I’ve really enjoyed reading Jeremiah’s take on various NoSQL systems.  It’s good to get this info from a former SQL Server guy that I trust and respect.

Grant Fritchey on foreign key constraints and performance – Grant excels at writing clear, easy-to-understand start-to-finish tutorials on advanced topics, making tough things seem easy.  If you like that blog post, you’ll love his book.

Dave Stein on paying his own way to the PASS Summit – I met Dave back when he was just starting to blog, and it’s been a privilege to watch him get more involved in the SQL Server community.  I believe that blogging, attending, presenting, tweeting, and volunteering will make you a happier, more fulfilled person, and Dave is proof of that.

Andy Leonard on the drama metaproblem – one of my mentors used to say, “There’s the problem, and then there’s your story about the problem.  Right now, just tell me about the problem, and we’ll talk about your story later.”  I have to deal with this a lot at clients – when the server’s on fire, everybody wants to talk about what led up to the problem.  I’ve had the privilege of working with Andy this year – not on technical issues, but on day-to-day decisionmaking issues that challenge us both personally and professionally.

Erin Stellato on desperately seeking seeks – another good start-to-finish tutorial post with code and screenshots, but it gets better.  The commenters joined in, pointed out tips, and Erin added a followup post.  Bloggers – this is the right way to handle feedback from your readers.  When your readers suggest improvements, you should be thankful, because it’s not every day you get to work with Paul White on your T-SQL!

Tim Ford on a typical geek conversation – in which Tim does a Venn diagram of the things he discussed with Jeremiah Peschka.  These guys are both so witty, so fast, so Dennis Miller before he started coasting.  If you ever get the chance to be in close proximity with these two, just sit back and listen for a while.

Yanni Robel on SQLskills Immersion training – this year Yanni got to attend both SQLCruise and Immersions, and she blogged about what it’s like to attend Immersions.  I liked this because it reminded me of the MCM training, and really, the Immersions course is pretty close to week 1 of the MCM.

Karen Lopez on understanding Generation Y teammates – I’m getting old.  I’d like to think I’m relatively hip (or whatever it is these youngsters call themselves), and I identify with the Gen Y traits in the article.  Earlier in my career, I made sure to be the first one in the office every morning, then leave at least 30 minutes after the clock-punchers raced out the door at 5pm.  Later, after I figured out my body’s best working hours, I started working from 6am to 11am, then 3pm to 6pm.  On days when I get up really early (like 4am), it’s not uncommon for me to call it quits at noon.  This worked out fine as a telecommuter, but for folks who have to show up in the office, they end up looking like slackers even though they’re still busting their humps.

Kendra Little on the “Clammy Seduction of the Print Statement” – I can’t stop giggling when I read that title.  I’ll go on record right now to say that Kendra is going to be one of the most popular speakers on the SQL Server circuit within the next two years.  Attendees will get baited in by her excellent abstracts, and she’s got the charisma to deliver a great presentation.

Crys Manson on heartbeats in Agent jobs – if you’ve got SQL Agent jobs that could run for hours, wouldn’t it be great if you could add a heartbeat step that would record its status in Job Monitor?  (Crys didn’t blog much in 2010, but I’m determined to push her out of her comfort zone in 2011.  (You could also read that as me making Crys uncomfortable, but I’ve already done that in 2010 to everyone I know by wearing a Richard Simmons costume on camera, nothing new there.))  She knows a ton of good stuff and she’s doing killer things at work with SQL Server.  She must share this. Now.

Mike Walsh on the best book ever written – OK, not really – it’s actually a book review of our book, but forget about that for a minute.  Look at the effort he put into writing the book review – examining chapter by chapter, explaining what you’ll learn.  Now THAT is a useful book review.  I aspire to write reviews that complete.

Stuart Ainsworth on the PASS Election 2010 – I linked not just to one post, but to a whole category on Stuart’s blog.  Stuart served on the Nomination Committee, which caught a lot of fire for the process.  Stuart took hours and hours out of his own time to volunteer, then turned around and took hours and hours to craft blog posts explaining what things were like on the inside.  My hat is off to him for his dedication to the community.  He’ll never earn a dollar for everything he did – he did it because he’s passionate about helping and making a difference.

I consider myself very privileged to have been able to read all this material for free thanks to blogs, and even more lucky to have been able to spend time with these people.  I think back to what my career was like before I started getting involved in the community, and I just shake my head.  Twitter, blogs, and conferences have introduced me to some of the finest people in our profession.  I hope to be working in technology for a very long time with these people, building relationships with them, learning what they’ve learned, and enjoying the ride.  Your career is not a sprint – it’s a marathon, and it helps to be running alongside people you admire.  Which brings me to the last post…

Steve Jones on the long road of your career – a transcript of Steve’s keynote at SQLSaturday Baton Rouge.  I read a lot of inspirational, motivational stuff (because I’m lazy) and this post left a mark on me.  I wish I could have been there in person to see the speech.  It’s the perfect 2010 post to leave you with.

And here’s the posts from those bloggers:

• Day 1: Jeremiah Peschka’s Favorite 2010 Post – Undeleting Tables by Mladen Prajdi?
• Day 2: Grant Fritchey picked Aaron Nelson’s Implicit Remoting with PowerShell
• Day 3: Dave Stein picked Todd McDermid’s Parallelism in SSIS Lookups
• Day 4: Andy Leonard picked Rafael Salas’s SSIS Parameters in Denali
• Day 5:Erin Stellato picked Adam Machanic’s Parallelism Week
• Day 6: Tim Ford picked Joe Webb’s Better Answers Through Listening
• Day 7: Yanni Robel picked Jonathan Kehayias’s Changes to Production Databases
• Day 8: Karen Lopez picked Louis Davidson on Over-Normalizing Databases
• Day 9: Kendra Little picked Paul White on Missing Shared Locks
• Day 10: Crys Manson picked Gail Shaw on Deleting the Transaction Log
• Day 11: Mike Walsh picked Janice Lee on Why You Should Verify Backups
• Day 12: Stuart Ainsworth picked a whole bunch of short-but-sweet technical posts
• Bonus Day: Steve Jones with the Wrapup

These days, I find myself using my iPad more and more as my main computing device on the road.  Some recent OS & app updates brought some killer improvements that have let me leave my laptop at home more often.  Here’s my favorites these days:

Be social with the Twitter app – The official Twitter app runs in the background, and whenever you’re mentioned in a tweet or you get a direct message, a notification pops up.  Just like a full-blown laptop, you can switch over to Twitter, reply, and then switch back over to your app, right where you left off.  This was the biggest thing I was missing at conferences – I wanted to take notes or work on my blog, but get alerted when someone asked me a question on Twitter.

Give better presentations with Apple Keynote – This is the Apple equivalent of PowerPoint.  It opens PowerPoint files, and when combined with the VGA dongle, it can display PowerPoint slides on a projector.  Just like PowerPoint’s presenter view, you get a presenter view on your iPad too!  There’s two serious drawbacks.  First, writing slide decks from scratch in Keynote on an iPad is hell, and second, while the VGA dongle is plugged in, you can’t plug in the charger.  This isn’t a dealbreaker given the iPad’s excellent battery life (usually 8-10 hours), but it’s a bummer.  At conferences, I spend most of my time running around like a SQLChicken with my head cut off, but I present for at least an hour a day.  That would be the perfect time for me to plug in and recharge the iPad, but no dice.

Read everything with GoodReader – this file viewer on steroids lets you read PDFs, Office documents, and much more, plus syncs with a file server, cloud server, FTP server, and even Google Docs!  I keep all my reference material with me on the road so I can answer questions faster.

Sync thoughts with Elements – I’m old school, and I keep all my notes in text files.  I use Elements as a text editor on my iPad, and it automatically syncs all my text files across my phone, laptops, and iPads via Dropbox, a free cloud file share service.  Elements does one thing, and it does it extremely well.

Manage my blog with WordPress – the best blogging platform has an app for writing posts, doing quick fixes on the road, and moderating & responding to comments.  It works on both iPads and iPhones, by the way.

My favorite other apps for traveling – I use Night Stand HD as a beautiful alarm clock while my iPad or iPhone is plugged in (and it never locks the screen), the free TripIt to track all my travel plans in one place, and Ambiance as a white noise generator.

My favorite games – I’m playing a lot of Angry Birds HD, Cut the Rope HD, Loops of Zen, Grand Theft Auto, Train Conductor 2, and The Incident.  Most of those have free versions to try out, too.

My favorite iPad cases – Ladies in the audience, I probably have more bags than you have purses.  I looove bags, and I’m not ashamed to say it – although I’m a little ashamed to admit that I’ve got more than a dozen laptop or iPad bags in rotation right now.  Here’s my favorites:

• Small – iPad-only messenger bag – Booq Push – when I want to take only the iPad and nothing but the iPad.  It’s extremely minimal, but the construction is just awesome.  Top-notch quality.  Leave your power charger behind, though, because the only thing you can bring with this is a USB cable, headphones, a VGA dongle, and airplane tickets.  Available at Amazon. (But not Prime as of this writing.)
• Medium – iPad shoulder bag – Booq Taipan XS – slightly larger with pockets to bring chargers, a small digital camera, and more little goodies.  Available at Amazon. (But not Prime as of this writing.)
• Large – iPad, DSLR, and more – Tamrac Rally 5 – I recently picked up a more serious digital camera and a couple of lenses, so this bag has become my leisure-trip carryon.  It houses my iPad, Lumix GF1, lenses, chargers, and whatnot in a smaller case than a typical laptop bag.  Tamrac makes a whole series of laptop + camera bags, including the Rally 7 for 15″ laptops plus DSLRs and lenses.

I know what you’re thinking, though.  “Brent, I don’t have an iPad, and I don’t want to hear any more about your cool toys.”  Well, I’ve got good news – make that great news.  I happen to know somebody who’s giving away ten iPads plus software to monitor your SQL Servers just in time for the holidays.  Watch this space!

Jen McCown (the wife part of the husband-and-wife MidnightDBA team) declared yesterday to be the first Un-SQL Friday – a day where bloggers talk about anything other than SQL Server.  The topic of the day was branding, and Jen’s post declared me a branding superstar.  (Awk-ward.)

I couldn’t participate right away because I already had a post scheduled for Friday, and I try not to overwhelm you guys with blog posts.  I read the responses unfold, and I’m not going to name names, but I saw a heck of a lot of really, really bad advice – and nobody referenced a book.

Hello, people.  Here comes the tough love.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.  In the land of SQL Server, the guy who’s only read a couple of books about it is considered a “branding superstar.”  I’ll be the first to tell you that I suck at branding and marketing, and I’ll tell you that because when it comes to marketing, I don’t consider my competitors to be the SQL Server community.  I consider my competitors to be the marketing community, because my real competitors are big consulting companies that can afford to hire full-time marketing departments.

When I quit my job in July and joined SQLskills, I stopped getting a paycheck.  Period.  I’m a consulting partner – I have to find clients, do work, and get the clients to pay us.  I thought for sure that I’d be eating ramen noodles for six months while I got my pipeline together, but a funny thing happened on the way to the microwave.  I got email after email that all started with the same few words: “I loved your blog/presentation/webcast on ___, and I was wondering if you could help us with…”

That’s the kind of customer that consulting companies love.  The customer already knows who I am, they know what I do, and they choose to work with me.  No cold calls, no taking the executives out to the golf course, no expensive dinners at steak houses – just instant relationships.  I can only do this because I’ve built a brand over the last few years that companies know they can trust, and that they want to work with by choice.  I could only do that because I learned from people who really understood branding and marketing, because I sure as heck don’t.

There are millions of people out there who do marketing for a living.  There are thousands of people who are amazing marketers, and there are dozens of books about it at your local bookstore.  Stop learning by trial and error and error and error – go pick up one of these books:

• Accidental Branding: How Ordinary People Build Extraordinary Brands – David Vinjamuri
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding – Al Ries and Laura Ries – you can break some of these laws and still become successful, but you’ll get a big head start if you play by the rules.
• The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business – Tara Hunt
• Permission Marketing – Turning Strangers Into Friends, and Friends Into Customers – Seth Godin
• All Marketers Are Liars Tell Stories – Seth Godin

You wouldn’t take your car to the dry cleaners to find out what that rattling noise is.  You wouldn’t go to your favorite restaurant to ask how to implement accounting software.  Likewise, don’t take branding advice from people who don’t make a successful living doing branding.  ‘Nuff said.

I’m angry when people steal my blog posts.  I’m bummed when people give away pirated PDF copies of our book.  But the very worst feeling for me is when someone steals my presentations.

I pour dozens of hours into each of my 45-60 minute sessions.  For every single one, I have to:

• Write the story
• Build the slide deck
• Pick just the right images and properly attribute them under Creative Commons
• Take product screenshots or write demo code
• Build a resources page on my site
• Rehearse
• Rehearse
• Rehearse some more
• Give the presentation at the local level, figure out what works and what didn’t, tweak the slide deck to refine it, and then start the rehearsal process again
• Eventually build up to presenting it at the national level

Some national conferences require me to upload my slide deck ahead of time, and every time I do it, I cringe.  I would love for every attendee to be able to use my slides as a set of notes for later reminders, but I’m terrified because of what plagiarists do with my slides.  Yes, people actually re-give my presentations, and I’m not the only one who’s fallen victim.  Here’s what you need to know before you submit an abstract to a conference:

Read the recording rights in the speaker contract. When you present at a major conference, you sign a speaker contract with that conference that gives the conference organizers certain rights.  Most conferences record video or audio of your session, and you need to be aware of what happens with those recordings afterward.  Some conferences like TechEd and SQLBits give the recordings away for free on the web, and some conferences like the PASS Summit sell the recordings.  If you pour a lot of time into building a session, and then people can view it for free over the web, you’ll have a tough time selling that content yourself later.  People will be less likely to pay for a pre-con session if they can get that same material for free online.

Find out if “recording” includes transcription posting rights. Some conferences have different ideas of what the word “recording” means.  I’ve worked with one conference that decided to take transcriptions of my session and publish them as separate articles on their web site.  That would have been okay with me if they’d have taken the time to use a spell checker and to polish the articles, but here’s what the article ended up looking like:

“Perfmon is real important.  As you can see here on the scren, when the Disck Reads metric is above this numbur, evertyhing is fine, but when it’s below this, pick your job up off the floor and…”

Since the article had my name on it, I was horrified, and I asked the conference to take it down immediately.  I volunteered to clean the article up myself at no charge because I’d rather lose money and look good than ignore it and look stupid.  Thankfully, they agreed to take it down period, but I learned my lesson – I won’t sign another speaker agreement that allows the conference to post transcriptions that I haven’t been able to approve ahead of time.

Find out if “recording” includes the slides. One conference’s contract includes the PowerPoint deck as part of the recording, then says the conference can do anything they want with the recording.  You have to read between the lines to figure out that this includes the ability to do anything they want with your slide deck, including taking your identifying information out and letting other people re-present your presentation!  Over the last couple of weeks, Adam Machanic, Gail Shaw, and I have been engaged in a struggle with a particular conference’s organizers.  The conference took previously presented decks, gave them to other presenters, and let them re-present the material.  I’m not going to name the conference because they’re working with us to improve how they handle ownership of presentations, thank goodness.  The frustrating part is that I had to repeatedly explain to the conference organizers just how bad this would be for their image if it became public.

Ideally, know your rights even before you submit an abstract. Some conferences will honor your requests for changes, but only if you make that a part of your abstract submission.  Having gone through the above messes, I know that certain conference organizers want me to say “This presentation and abstract is copyright Brent Ozar, and no rights are transferable to anyone else without my express written permission ahead of time.”  I’m frustrated that I have to even tell them that, but it is what it is, and if I don’t include that in the abstract then I may have to back out of the conference later when the speaker contract arrives.

Decide when you’re willing to let presentations go to the public. For certain events, I give attendees my PowerPoint slides because I want them to re-deliver my presentations.  I want my SQLCruise attendees to take their new-found knowledge back to the office, then give the presentations to their coworkers.  Their boss will see the value gained by sending someone on the cruise, and then hopefully pay for the attendee to return each year.  However, I make it really clear to the attendees that they’re not allowed to present these decks in public or to user groups.  For other events, I build decks knowing full well that they’ve got an expiration date – I won’t ever be able to attract as many in-person viewers once the presentation is available on the web for free.

Share PDF copies of your presentation, not the PowerPoint original. When attendees and conferences want copies of your slide decks, don’t give them the PPTX files.  Give them an exported PDF copy of the slides, which is good enough for people who need to verify that you’ve got content ready or want to take notes.  When people insist on getting the PowerPoint slides, ask them why, and don’t be satisfied with brush-off answers.  You’re the content owner – take control of your content.

Set up Google Alerts for your presentation titles and abstracts. It really bums me out to even have to type that, but the reality is that plagiarism isn’t going away.  When you get a hit, politely approach the speaker and ask, “I see that you’re presenting on The Top 10 Ways to Make Microsoft Access Stop Sucking.  That sounds a lot like a presentation I did last month, and I’d love to hear more about your ideas.”  When a speaker truly didn’t know about your presentation, they’ll be excited to bounce ideas off you.  On the other hand, if they were planning on plagiarizing your work, they’ll adjust their plans accordingly.  If they don’t respond in a way that gives you the warm-and-fuzzies, email the conference organizers and give them a heads-up.

Finally, don’t use copyrighted material in your own presentations. Movie pictures, album covers, and other people’s photos are generally off-limits.  Instead, use my post on Finding Free Pictures for Blog Posts and Presentations.

When I complain about plagiarism, I hear the same thing over and over from other bloggers: “Nobody ever plagiarizes me.  I guess I’m not that important.”

Really?  So you’ve been checking to see if your stuff has been copied?

“Uh, no….”

Exactly.  It’s time to find out how.

Watch Your Trackbacks and Incoming Links

Odds are your blog posts will include links back to your own site at some point, like when you refer to your other posts. The quickest way to stay on top of this is to glance at the “Incoming Links” module in your WordPress dashboard:

In that screenshot, I can see that Steve Jones, Tom LaRock, Stacia Misner, Ted Kreuger, and “unknown” have all linked to my site recently.  By glancing at that list, I can see that most of those are completely okay, but the “unknown” one gives me pause, so I’d click on that to make sure it’s a legit blog.  On a side note, you should always monitor these anyway, click on all of the links, and read what people are saying about you.

Another built-in WordPress tool is the list of pingbacks.  When people copy your work verbatim and publish it, their blog may try to send a pingback link alerting you.  Go into your Comments list and filter it by pings only:

In that screenshot, I can see that Sean Gallardy has linked to my SQL Server checklist.  I would want to click on that link to make sure it’s not an exact word-for-word copy of my own checklist, or another one of my blog posts that happened to link to my own checklist.

Set Up Free Google Alerts

Even if the plagiarist is smart enough to disable pingbacks, they probably won’t strip the links out of your blog posts.  To catch those, I set up Google Alerts for real-time notifications; whenever Google runs across the word “BrentOzar.com” anywhere on the web, they send me an email.  I can tell at a glance if it’s a plagiarized post, a forum question pointing to one of my articles, or a blog comment.  I’ve set up similar alerts for sites I manage, my name, companies I work for, and so on.

When I’ve built a blog post I’m particularly proud of, I even set up Google Alerts for key phrases in the post.  For example, in my SQL Server 2008 DAC Pack blog post, I used the phrase “Bringing Sexy DAC.”  I can be fairly certain that phrase will not come up often, and if it shows up on the intertubes, somebody’s stealin’ my work.  That phrase is a little down the page, beyond the first paragraph, so it shouldn’t show up if someone’s only showing the first few sentences of my post (which would be okay.)  I set up a Google Alert for that, and if anybody is automatically reposting my work, I get notified.

(Yes, I’ve deleted that Google Alert now because I know by saying this, I’m going to get a bunch of tweets saying “I’m Bringing Sexy DAC!” Heh. I love you people.)

Monitor Your Referrers

If you’re using web analytics tracking to see how (un)popular your site is, it probably has a screen to show which sites are linking to you.  In my favorite free web analytics tool, Google Analytics, it’s under Traffic Sources, Referring Sites:

Because the plagiarist may not be popular yet, you need to go through ALL of the referring sites, not just the top ten.  The more popular you get, the more painful this gets, but on the plus side, you get a warm, fuzzy feeling seeing everybody linking to you in a good way.

I go through this list looking for sites I don’t recognize, then I drill into the analytics to find out exactly where in the site they’re coming from, and I click on it.  Hopefully it’s not an exact copy of one of my posts that links to another one of my posts.

Use Tynt.com to Tweak Copy/Paste

This has to be one of the coolest tools I’ve ever seen.  The easiest way to understand how it works is to see it in action.  Go to any page on BrentOzar.com, select some text, copy it, and then paste it into a text editor:

SHAZAM.  It doesn’t get much more obvious than that.  I used to use more polite wording, but after being repeatedly plagiarized, I’m going with the big guns now.

Tynt even gives you a slick dashboard to show where your content is being pasted:

And it’s even completely free!  Go sign up for Tynt today, put their Javascript code in your header, and you’re off and running.  (The technique of doing this varies by which blog theme you’re using.)

Search Manually with Copyscape.com

Finally, every now and then I go searching for copies of my recent posts with Copyscape.com.  I put in a URL to a recent post (30-60 days old), and Copyscape goes hunting for similar copies.  Their logic is pretty fuzzy, and it gives me a lot more misses than hits, but when it hits, it hits big time.  It catches plagiarists who are smart enough to disable trackbacks, strip out your links, and even futz with your wording to try to make it look different.

This is how I caught CrazySQL initially, and how I found that BugoSQL was trying to hide some of my posts in disguised PDF files.

It’s a lot of work catching these diabolical bastards, and it’s like a never-ending game of Whack-a-Mole.  I have to keep playing because I make a living off my content – it’s my marketing tool to bring in new consulting customers.  This is especially important to me now that I’ve become a full time consultant; I don’t get paid unless I’m working for a client.  I’m not getting paid to write this, either, but I do it because I’m passionate about helping the community and helping bloggers protect their content.

“If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy float by.” – Proverb

“The tribe has spoken. It’s time for you to go.” Jeff Probst, Survivor

In Monday’s post about the latest plagiarist, I talked about how WordPress.com is wonderfully responsive to complaints of plagiarism.  Whenever I find my work copied on a blog hosted at WordPress.com, I email the blogger first to talk them into taking it down.  If they don’t respond or comply, I just file a DMCA request via email, and WordPress takes the offending pages down within a day or two.  I don’t bother alerting the community if it’s just one or two posts, or if I’m the only guy who’s been ripped off.  I’d rather just get the problem fixed, move past it, and let the plagiarist lick their wounds in private.

Unfortunately, not every host responds like WordPress.com, and the problem gets worse with self-hosted and international sites.

For the last year, I’ve been struggling with another site that’s copying my stuff:

Pardon my French, but I hate these bastards.

1. They’re physically copy/pasting my articles.  If you see the “Read more” link, that’s what happens when you copy/paste content off my web page thanks to Tynt.com, a great tool for bloggers that I’ll be discussing later this week.  This jerk is just going to my page, highlighting what he likes, copying it, and pasting it into his own blog.
2. They’re hotlinking to my images.  The error message you see (it even includes BrentO!) resides on i.brentozar.com, my caching site, and I pay whenever someone views that image.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not expensive, but this lazy no-good bum is costing me money.
3. They’re ripping off my stuff, Microsoft TechNet, MSSQLTips, and a bunch of you bloggers.
4. They have no contact link to send email, and no personally identifying information.
5. They’re using UmbraHosting.com, and that crappy hosting company doesn’t respond to DMCA requests or emails.  They’re effectively condoning plagiarism.

A few days ago, I was ecstatic to see that the domain name had lapsed without being renewed, and the site went down.  Gail Shaw and I were cheering that this bozo had finally bit the dust, but like a zombie, he’s back from the dead.

So I give.  I can’t get this site to die, and that’s where you come in.  I can’t offer a bounty to whoever gets the plagiarism removed off that site, because that’ll be too tough to prove, so I’ll offer a reward instead.

When that site is no longer serving plagiarized material (either because it’s taken down altogether, or the plagiarized material is gone) I’ll donate $250 to the non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation in the name of the SQL Server community.

C’mon, people.  Show me what ya got.  Ferret out the owner of this site, get in contact with the hosting company, and show off your ability to play Internet Detective.

Update Nov 18th – it’s down!  I’m going to wait a few days to make sure they stay down, and then I’m ecstatic to make the $250 donation to the EFF.

Update December 4th – in the last couple of weeks it went up and came down a couple of times, but their web host has assured me they won’t let it go online again with copyrighted material intact.  To celebrate, I’ve made the $250 donation to the EFF.  Yay, rights protection!  I got a swag package for the $250 donation, and I’ll give that away on my blog when I get it.

Every now and then I get enough content piled up about a subject that I decide to dedicate a whole week-long blog post series to it.  The good news is that you’ll have plenty of original material to read this week, but the bad news is that you’ll also have copied material too.  Welcome to Plagiarism Week!

When I was researching material for my FreeCon, I wanted to show bloggers how to optimize their site for search engines.  One of the topics involved putting related images in each blog post; if you’ve got a story about SQL Server setup checklists, you should put screenshots in there and tag them appropriately.  Search engines recognize that your post is more complete than others because it’s got eye candy.

To illustrate it, I went to Images.Google.com and searched for SQL Server setup checklists because I’m quite fond of my setup checklist post and it does well in search engines.  The results look like this:

The third result is mine, and I recognized it immediately because the screenshot had my company’s SQL Server name in it (from the time I wrote the post).  The majority of the images on the page do indeed relate to SQL Server, but some of them are surprising.  For example, the baby’s face at the bottom left might seem odd, but it’s actually from the comment avatars on my blog post.  The one that intrigued me most was result #4 – the MCITP logo.  That’s a pretty high-ranking result for such a generic picture – the content must be fantastic!  So I clicked on it:

Wow, that is indeed some good content.  Of course, I might be a little biased, because it’s my checklist.

Compare the copied checklist screenshot above (no, I’m not going to link to that guy’s site) to my SQL Server setup checklist, and you’ll notice that he stripped out my introductory paragraphs where I talk about building these checklists through my years of experience.  He didn’t just delete my personal text, he also went to the effort of deleting every link back to my site, including the images.  He even merged my Part 1 and Part 2 pages together to avoid linking to me.

This isn’t a casual copy/paste job or an RSS tool – this is a hard-working plagiarist who had managed to circumvent every protection I’d built into the blog.  He had ads on the checklist, and he’d managed to rise to the first page of Bing results:

I hadn’t caught this guy earlier because I use Google, and he doesn’t show up in Google’s results.  No, I’m not saying Bing promotes plagiarism – I’m just saying it’s like the high school teacher who didn’t quite catch on that you copied your term paper from mine.

I followed the steps in my article What to Do When Someone Steals Your Blog Posts.  I contacted the author via the email on his About Me page and LinkedIn profile, neither of which I’m going to link to here.  When someone links to your web site, search engines believe you have a more credible web site, and I’m not about to give this guy any Google juice.  When he didn’t respond to emails, I filed DMCA takedown notices with his web host, WordPress.com, which has always been extremely responsive for me.  I love how WordPress protects the rights of authors whose content has been stolen:

I wasn’t his only victim.  He stole multiple posts from Microsoft, too, like this one:

The bad news is that he may have stolen your content, too.  Since he went to great lengths to disguise my content, I’m guessing he may have disguised yours too, so it’s time to spend some time reading his web site:

If you interact with this author, I have two requests.  First, keep it civil – he’s a real guy somewhere with a real life and a real job.  He made mistakes, and he’s about to learn from them, but it’s not like he killed anybody.  I could have emailed my contacts at his employer, but I don’t want to ruin his life – I just wanted the plagiarism to stop.  Keep the punishment in perspective.  Second, don’t make racial comments – remember that the last big plagiarism scandal around here was a white guy from the US.  It can happen anywhere to anyone.

Microsoft just announced the release of the next version of SQL Server, code named Denali, at the PASS Summit in Seattle.  The Community Technology Preview (CTP) version, somewhat like an early alpha or beta release, is available for download now to MSDN members.  It’s available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and it shows up as version 11.0.1103.9.

After installation, here’s what the launch screen looks like for SQL Server Management Studio, which gives away the first clue of changes:

Deep, calming breaths.  Despite the “Powered by Visual Studio” label, SSMS hasn’t changed dramatically since it was originally introduced back in SQL Server 2005.  After seeing the terrifying splash screen and logging into a server, we’re met with the traditional user interface seen below.

There’s one tweak that pops out right away: there’s a dark blue background around the edges of the window panes.  There’s just enough to be familiar and comforting here, but Visual Studio users will recognize the hint – the objects on this screen can be undocked!  Simply grab hold of Object Explorer or Object Explorer Details, drag them away from SSMS, and presto:

Welcome to 2010, people – we’ve finally got multi-monitor support for SQL Server Management Studio!  We can tear windows off and drag them off to different monitors.  This new Visual Studio based user interface brings some baggage with it, though – Visual Studio users will note that over some remote desktop connections, WPF-based apps can be slow or downright unusable.  Microsoft has blogged about ways to improve Visual Studio performance over RDP, but it’s still a sore point for many users.

The “Denali” branding is everywhere in this early CTP, and I’m not sure what the final release name will be – SQL Server 2011 would follow the previous naming conventions, but even the database versions on the database properties page show up as Denali:

Keen-eyed readers will notice a new “Containment type” option on that page, and there’s plenty of other goodies scattered through the UI that hint at improvements under the engine’s hood.  One of the more interesting to me is a new Distributed Replay trace utility to push a lot of load from different computers simultaneously, all controlled from a central computer.  Stress testing SQL Server has been painful without getting third party tools involved, and now it looks like we might have something in the box to give us a hand.

From what I’ve seen so far, though, this release mostly represents a set of incremental improvements, not a dramatic shift like we saw from SQL Server 2000 to 2005 – mostly.  There’s one change that’s got me dancing on my chair, and it deserves a separate blog post all by itself – Denali’s new High Availability & Disaster Recovery options, aka HADRON.

You can download SQL Server Denali (2011) CTP1 today for free.

Just a few quick notes about security before anyone shows up at the PASS Summit.

First, set up lock codes on your phones, iPads, and laptops.  Those of us who are security-conscious tend to play pranks on those of us who aren’t.  (Ask Tom LaRock about the year he found a shirtless fireman on his desktop wallpaper and couldn’t get it back off – we play for keeps.)

Second, install the Firefox plugin HTTPS Everywhere.  This forces popular web sites like FaceBook, Live, and Twitter to use HTTPS instead of HTTP, thereby encrypting your web surfing instead of SSL.

Third, when you’ve done the above two, check out Firesheep.  It’s a Firefox extension that listens to unencrypted HTTP traffic on your WiFi network and lets you instantly log in as any sucker who isn’t using HTTPS.  This works great at hotels and conferences where lots of your friends (or enemies, whatever) are surfing during keynote addresses.

Consider yourself warned.

At least one person was paying attention when I recently blogged about the problems running SQL Server on power-saving processors.  One of my clients, the Northwestern Medical Data Warehouse, decided to check out the settings on their brand-new IBM x3850.  Sure enough, they were set to save power by default, so they tweaked that and tried Geekbench again.  They got great results – so good, in fact, that they just had to post ’em to the public Geekbench results board:

After making the tweaks, they’re #1 on the Geekbench results chart!  Think your server can beat it?  Download the free Geekbench testing tool and see how you do.  Of course, correct those power settings first.

StackOverflow went through a few infrastructure upgrades this week.  Jeff Atwood blogged about the changes, and Kyle Brandt goes into more detail. Here’s a short recap of some of the SQL Server changes:

• Changed physical server models (from IBM/Lenovo to Dells)
• Went from two quad-core Xeons to two six-core Xeons
• Enabled hyperthreading (so it looked like 24 cores)
• Went from SQL Server 2008 to SQL Server 2008 R2
• Went from 6 SATA drives to 8 SATA drives (yes, they’re really doing over 2 million page views a day using a handful of cheap drives, but it’s all in the l33t programming, because they do their own caching)
• Did some index tuning
• Moved from one datacenter to another

That’s a lot of moving parts.  When the dust settled, the CPU use on the SQL Server had gone up, not down.  So where do we start troubleshooting?

I love good developers because they do unit testing.  (Yes, readers, that means if you’re not doing unit testing, you’re not a good developer.)  The most reliable way to troubleshoot is to boil things down to the simplest repeatable test possible.  They identified two different queries that had dramatically different results between the old server and the new server.  I looked at the execution plans produced by these queries on both the old and new servers.  Everything was identical – same plans, similar reads, similar results – except for one thing: CPU time.  You can measure CPU time for a query by executing SET STATISTICS TIME ON in SQL Server Management Studio.  From that point forward, all queries in that session will have a bonus set of metrics in the Messages tab listing the milliseconds of CPU time used.

The same query doing the same amount of work took about twice as many milliseconds on the new server as it did the old server.  That meant we had two possibilities: either something under the hood of SQL Server 2008 R2 had gone horribly awry and was doing twice as much CPU work for the exact same execution plan, or the new CPUs were twice as slow.  The server manufacturers said the new CPUs ran at 3.33GHz – but did they really?  I busted out the trusty free CPU-Z tool and ran it on the new servers:

Compare the “Specification” line to the “Core Speed” line.  As we say in the business, wah wah wah waaaaah.

The new CPUs were Intel’s diabolical power-saving Nehalems, which have given me no end of grief.  My hat is off to them for saving the planet by using less power, but my pants are down to them for killing performance without informing the users.  In the last few weeks, I’ve seen several cases where server upgrades have resulted in worse performance, and one of the key factors has been throttled-down CPUs.  In theory, the servers should crank up the juice according to demand, but in reality, that’s rarely the case.  Server manufacturers are hiding power-saving settings in the BIOS, and Windows Server ships with a default power-saving option that throttles the CPU down way too often.

I was able to prove the problem by running several simultaneous load-test queries that push SQL Server’s CPU hard.  When running just one or two of them, the processors didn’t speed up, but if I ran enough of them, the server said, “Alright, alright, I get it.  I’ll speed my cores up.  Jeez.”

The instant I reduced the number of running queries, the CPUs got lazy again.  If you think that’s bad, there might be servers in your datacenter right now running just 800MHz, and they won’t even speed up when they’re under load:

There’s a few morals to the story:

Periodically test your CPUs with CPU-Z. Know their spec speed and their current speed.  Saving power by throttling down is fine, but understand that they may not run full speed until they’re under very heavy load.  StackOverflow was consistently running 50-60% CPU load, and the processors still weren’t speeding up.  Since the power-saving speed was 1.6GHz, their CPU-intensive queries were literally running half as fast as their old server.

When you change your infrastructure, minimize variables. If you change half a dozen things at once, troubleshooting performance is much more difficult.  I used to work at a company that did periodic outages to fix infrastructure issues like battery backups and air conditioning, and one of our IT team loved to take advantage of those excused outages to upgrade all his servers.  More memory, different network cabling designs, new software versions, you name it, he’d do it.  When the power came back on and his servers didn’t work, his users kept asking, “But I thought all we were doing was repairing the air conditioning?”

A/B test your solution with the smallest unit test possible. In StackOverflow’s case, we narrowed it down to just two queries, and we set up a separate testing environment where we could try out different solutions.  When we narrowed it down to the CPU clock speeds, we were able to instantly say with confidence, “Yep, we found it, and now we can take production down to fix it.”