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Every year, Quest Software convenes a Customer Advisory Board at the home office in Aliso Viejo, California.  We bring some of our highly experienced customers out for a couple of days to talk about what’s happening with technology, and good times are had by all.

At the welcome reception, I was struck by how many of them had a great sense of humor.  I was standing in a room with a couple dozen seasoned and talented IT people, yet jokes were flying around left and right.  Let’s face it, us geeks aren’t exactly renown for our ability to light up a room.  We can be funny-ha-ha in private or on the intertubez, but this was a group of near-strangers that were cutting things up.

The morning after, as I was thinking back about it, I figured there were two possibilities:

Option 1: We Hand-Picked Funny Customers

If we hand-picked the comedians, then I bet we’re not the only company who would do something like that.  I bet funny people are more likely to get invited to events like this because they’re more enjoyable to be around.  After all, who wants to invite a bunch of grumpy people to hang out in a conference room for a few days?  If I wanted that, I’d just call a team meeting. <rimshot>

For the record, funny customers doesn’t mean happy customers – we’re not surrounding ourselves with yes-men by any means.  To force the products to get better, we have to hear brutally honest and honestly brutal feedback.

Option 2: Funny People Are More Likely to Succeed in IT

Who gets promoted into higher-level IT positions like DBA management?

To answer that question, back up and ask yourself who does the actual promotions.  When was the last time the CIO came to you and said, “Hey, I’m thinking about appointing a new DBA manager.  Who’s the best person for the job?”

Promotions aren’t handled by underlings – the higher-ranking folks pick and choose who they promote.  For better or for worse, they often don’t do it with the feedback of the rest of us.  They think they know what we think and who we like, and they might take it into account, but they may not.  However, they know exactly who they like – they like people who are easy to get along with, easy to interact with, and easy to sit in a conference room with.  Sadly, management involves meeting after meeting after meeting.  Why bring bores to the meeting?

Either way, if you wanna get ahead, have a sense of humor about what you’re doing.  If you think things are too serious in your job now, then brace yourself, because problems get worse as you go up the corporate ladder.  Getting promoted to management means worrying about who you’re going to lay off, how you’re going to handle Johnny’s drug problem, or how you’re going to decide who gets a raise.  Employees are much harder to manage than technology, because servers don’t bring a gun into the office to take revenge.

Life is short and workdays are long.  To get the most out of both, get yourself a sense of humor pronto.  Stop taking yourself so seriously, and people will be more likely to invite you to fun stuff and bring you up the corporate ladder.

(Note – I’m on vacation, so I probably won’t be responding to comments for a few days. I scheduled this post ahead of time. I’m on a sailboat in Lake Michigan, and I’ll respond if I get within wireless range. And yes, I’m bringing my laptop.)

Today at the Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, Microsoft announced a free web-based version of Microsoft Office 2010.  Much like Google Docs, Office users will be able to collaborate on the same document at the same time from anywhere, even without Office installed.  Users will be able to edit documents from IE, Firefox, Safari, even iPhones.

I’m completely sold on cloud-based collaboration technologies, and I’ve been an avid user of Google Docs for years.  It helps me break down walls between internal and external collaborators.  Right now, as we speak, several of us are editing a Google Docs spreadsheet to vote on the winners of the Best Thing I Learned At PASS contest.  I was able to set up a new document, share it with several people, and get collaboration working without any VPN problems, permissions, file sharing difficulties, you name it.  Presto, any one of several people can edit my spreadsheet.

Now replace “contest results” with “P&L statement”, and start asking questions.

Picture your CFO sharing the P&L results with several high-ranking executives.  Are all the cells locked?  Are you sure?  What happens when someone changes numbers?  How good is your change tracking?  Where did those sales figures come from?  Can you show the family tree for any given cell of data?

When I was a data warehouse administrator, end users constantly came up to me and said, “The data’s wrong in the data warehouse.  This here number on my report can’t possibly be right.”  To troubleshoot it, I had to ask:

• What’s the calculation used to build this number?  Are we sure we’re summing when we’re not supposed to average?
• What’s the SQL query used to get the data?  Are the joins right?  Are the group-bys right?
• Where did the underlying data come from?  Did last night’s ETL bring in some bogus data, or is the data wrong in the source system?

Reports built by end users are troublesome enough, but when data can be shared and edited by anyone under open circumstances, change management gets more challenging.  In the future, us database administrators will need to pay even more attention to how reports are built and where those numbers are coming from, lest we get thrown under the bus for spreadsheet edits by L337CPA.

Donabelle Santos (Twitter – Blog) celebrated her birthday today, and her coworkers at Black Ninja Software set her up.  They pinged me to ask if I’d call her to surprise her on her birthday, and one thing led to another.  Next thing you know, she was getting an urgent support call from Ted Striker.  Ted (played by me) was having a few SQL Server problems.  I slowly laid them out one at a time:

• He’d upsized his Access stuff to SQL Server
• Using one database per client
• For 1,600 clients
• With the databases hosted on a USB hard drive
• And he wanted to bring in more data from tables stored in Microsoft Word

She kept her composure much better than I would have, and she never once blurted out, “What the hell were you thinking?!?!”  Congratulations, Donabelle!  Here’s to hoping the rest of your customers this year are brighter than Ted.  And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go bomb the storage depots at Daiquiri.

Wanna be the best at what you do?

Start paying attention to more than just “what you do.”

What Ken Block Does

Ken Block is a rally car driver, which means he slides cars around dangerous obstacles at high speed with great precision.  Thing is, though, lots of people can do that.  Standing out in a field of adrenaline junkies means going above and beyond the job description and giving your fans a truly amazing experience.  He recently did a video with James “Captain Slow” May of Top Gear, and it’s quite a watch – even just to hear James May say the phrase “Facetube.”  While watching, it may help to know that May is also a pilot with his own planes, so he may be especially nervous at the thought of sliding sports cars around someone else’s planes.

At about four minutes in, Block slides his Subaru alongside a taxiing airplane.

That’s amazing.

It’s amazing for his car control, but to just see the car control alone is missing the point. It’s impressive not just for how incredibly difficult it is, but also for how entertaining it is.  The whole is more than the sum of its parts, and what Ken Block “does” as a rally car driver is just one small part of this video.  It’s about stunts, it’s about humor, it’s about timing, it’s about moviemaking, and more.  Sure, Ken Block wins trophies, but paying attention to these kinds of details make him money.  People are willing to shell out big bucks when you get every part of the experience right, and I’ll give you an example from my upcoming travels this month.

Molecular Gastronomy: Stunt Cooking

The phrase “molecular gastronomy” might sound like food for geeks, but that’s missing the point.  The chefs might be geeks, but you don’t have to be geeky in order to appreciate the food.  Rather, molecular gastronomy is food for people who like to watch stunt car drivers.

On July 29th, I’m going to have a fourteen-course dinner, and one of the courses will be Eggs Benedict.  It’s going to look like the picture shown here.  (Hopefully.)

I know what you’re thinking: “Brent, you’re an idiot.  That’s not Eggs Benedict.”  Exactly – in the same way that what Ken Block is doing isn’t driving.  If you suspend skepticism for a minute and zoom in on that food, you’ll see that it’s chock full of stunts.

Sauce is a liquid.  Liquids, by their very nature, can’t be deep fried, right? You can’t take a lump of mayo, drop it into a deep fryer, and expect anything recognizable to emerge, no matter how thoroughly you coat that lump in bread crumbs.  But see those little cubes in the picture?  That’s deep fried hollandaise sauce.  See the cylindrical column?  Egg yolk.  The razor-thin sheet of something?  That’d be bacon.

Deep frying liquid is a stunt – but that alone doesn’t make good eats.  You have to have a reason to deep fry the liquid, the reason being a final result dish that is somehow in desperate need of deep fried liquid.  Otherwise, you’re not really doing anything more revolutionary than deep fried Twinkies at the state fair.

Like stunt car driving, when it’s done amazingly well, molecular gastronomy is an art involving more than one sense – and Wylie Dufresne does it very well.  Don’t take my word for it – read the WD-50 review by the New York Times.  That place is one of only two restaurants on my bucket list – the other being Paula Deen’s restaurant in Savannah, Georgia.  Hard-core readers will recall that I blogged about visiting The Lady and Sons a couple years ago during a road trip, and this is pretty much a polar opposite experience.

The key word shared between WD-50, The Lady and Sons, and Ken Block’s driving videos is experience, and I’m not talking about the number of years you’ve been punching the clock.

What’s Your User Experience Like?

When someone steps into your cubicle to work with you on a problem, are they scared?  Intimidated?  Pissed off?  Most of us database administrators have ugly, nasty reputations for always saying no and never explaining why.  Think about what that’s like for your customers – and yes, even if people aren’t paying you directly, they’re your customers.

I’ve never given Ken Block a dime, but in a way, I’m his customer, and he’s gone way out of his way to build a killer experience for me.  He’s building a brand that he can sell to advertisers like DC Shoes.  Web sites work the same way, too; in today’s Coding Horror blog entry, Jeff Atwood talks about the business of building a successful web site:

“Despite Benjamin’s well reasoned protests, the source code to Stack Overflow is, in fact, actually, kind of … well, trivial. Although there is starting to be quite a lot of it, as we’ve been beating on this stuff for almost a year now. That doesn’t mean our source code is good, by any means; as usual, we make crappy software, with bugs. But every day, our tiny little three person team of speedy-but-doomed Velociraptors starts out with the same goal. Not to write the best Stack Overflow code possible, but to create the best Stack Overflow experience possible. That’s our mission: make Stack Overflow better, in some small way, than it was the day before. We don’t always succeed, but we try very, very hard not to suck — and more importantly, we keep plugging away at it, day after day.”

Users aren’t giving any money directly to StackOverflow, but Jeff knows he has to build a killer end user experience because that experience pays off in other ways.  Your career has the same goals.  Even though the developers, project managers and end users may not pay your salary, they do have political capital with your boss.  They can make or break your career in an instant.

After years of working with people who want to throw triggers everywhere, people who don’t understand the basics of indexes, people who want their server to run 24/7 for zero cost, and people who call you every weekend for trivial support issues, it’s easy to become cynical and angry.  It’s easy to let yourself slip into growling when you pick up the phone.  Heck, I have to refocus on this all the time – I get frustrated too, despite the shiny-happy-upbeat-please-your-customers stuff I post on the blog.  Building a good end user experience is a never-ending journey.

To be the best at what you do, it’s not enough to just do what you do. Lots of people toil away just like you every day cranking out widgets. The difference is making people want to go out of their way in order to work with you and to watch you work.

In the aftermath of the InformationFlash plagiarism incident, several questions have come up from the site’s webmaster and from other bloggers.

Is it okay if the plagiarizer isn’t making money?

No.  Authors work really, really hard to create their original content.  Seeing someone else pass it off as their own, whether there’s a charge or not, reduces the value of our hard work.

If I took the whole content of The Manga Guide to Databases and reproduced it here on my blog, I wouldn’t be making a dime off it.  However, I’d be robbing the author of income.  Even if that author was giving away the work for free, the author might be benefitting in a way that I don’t understand yet, so I need to contact the author before republishing their copyrighted work.

Is it okay if I don’t understand my blog aggregation software?

No.  If you pick up a gun, it’s your responsibility to understand how it works. The first time it accidentally goes off and shoots somebody, you might be able to get away with claiming you didn’t know it was loaded.  After several people complain about gunshot injuries, though, you need to put the gun down.

Just as you can go to a local gun club to learn about firearm safety, you can get help with RSS aggregators too.  Post a message in the product’s support forum, contact other users of the product, or post a message on StackOverflow.  But whatever you do, don’t wave that thing around until you understand what you’re doing.

Shouldn’t the bloggers change their feeds to prevent theft?

Bloggers can choose whether to include the full article or just a few words in the RSS feed.  In my series on how to start a technical blog, I recommend using the full article because readers like it a lot more.  They don’t want to click through to read your full article on your site.  (Personally, I hate the holy hell out of blogs who just include the abstract, and their content has to be insanely good for me to subscribe to one of those kinds of blogs.)

Even if the blogger changes their feed to just include an abstract, it still doesn’t prevent syndication sites from stealing content with screen-scraping techniques.  Then the naysayers would say, “It’s the blogger’s fault for not requiring a username and password in order to read the blog.”

If we have another site pop up like InformationFlash, I’ll probably end up including a copyright note at the bottom of every blog entry.  It’ll say something like, “If you’re not reading this article at BrentOzar.com or SQLServerPedia.com, it was stolen.”  I hate doing that, though, because it looks crappy.  It’s like bolting the TV remote to the nightstand.

Is it okay if end users submit the copyrighted blogs?

No.  When the owner of copyrighted content notifies you that your site has their stuff on it, and they want it taken down, you have to take it down pronto.  YouTube is a good example because people try to upload copyrighted data all the time.  If the original content owner files a DMCA complaint at YouTube, then YouTube acts quickly to take the content down.

Just as a side note – if you try to claim some other user uploaded the copyrighted content, you need to be *very* prepared to show database records and web server access logs to prove the site administrator wasn’t the one uploading content.

How come it’s okay when Digg or DotNetKicks does it?

Because those sites don’t publish the full content of the article.  They show the first few words of the article, and if the reader is interested, they click through to the full content of the article on the blogger’s site.

InformationFlash was showing the entire article, start to finish, without even showing the author’s name.  That isn’t promoting the authors at all.  To make matters worse, InformationFlash had a Google PageRank of a whopping zero – meaning it wasn’t promoting anyone other than itself by stealing content.

Then is it okay if the site promotes the bloggers?

No. When you’re taking copyrighted content from bloggers, you have to get their permission first, period.

Some authors are completely okay with you republishing their work as long as you attribute them appropriately and link back to them.  For example, I’ve told SQL Server Magazine they’re free to use any material from my blog as long as they quote me.  (Part of this is a selfish reason: despite what Compete thinks, I’m pretty sure SQL Server Magazine has more readers than I do.)

Is it okay if it’s not illegal?

Even if you register your domain name anonymously and ignore all incoming emails, sooner or later people are going to figure out your real name.  They’re going to post your name in public along with an explanation of what happened.  That kind of information will turn up in Google searches, and it’ll make for very ugly job interviews and client negotiations down the road.

Besides, don’t you want to be successful?  Your site simply can’t become a success by alienating the very people upon whom your site depends for content.  You can be successful by working with the community and making sure everything is a win-win.  It’s not easy, and it’s not cheap, but it works in the long run.

Stealing is easy and cheap – but the long-term outlook is not so good.

If your copyrighted blog content shows up in whole on another site without proper attribution like InformationFlash.com is doing, here’s a few steps you can take. IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), so YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary).

Send the Webmaster a Cease & Desist Letter

Get a sample cease & desist letter and tailor it to include your own content information. Identify the exact copyrighted blog post that’s showing up on their site.

The webmaster may not be aware of the plagiarism. Sometimes end users post copyrighted material on their own without the webmaster being aware. In other cases, the admin themselves may be doing the copying. Sending a Cease & Desist to the webmaster helps them understand that you didn’t give them permission to post it on their site.

Some sites like InformationFlash don’t make it easy – they don’t publish any personal information on their site, and they try to hide behind private domain registrations. They only accept emails through a contact form, thereby making it impossible to guarantee message delivery. No problem – keep reading.

Send Their ISP’s Abuse Department a DMCA Takedown Notice

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects the intellectual property rights of people who create content, like bloggers. Title II of the DMCA is an agreement between you (the copyright holder) and internet service providers (the web hosting company). As long as the copyright holders notify the ISP and the ISP reacts appropriately, then the ISP is not liable for the copyright infringement. Only the plagiarist is liable. That means web hosting companies and internet providers react swiftly and fairly to complaints of copyright infringement.

Get a sample DMCA notice to hosting companies and send it to the web host. In the case of InformationFlash, you can send it to abuse@dreamhost.com. I took the extra measure of sending one DMCA takedown notice per copyrighted article to show the extent of the problem.

Send Search Engines a DMCA Notice Too

If the site’s webmaster and their web host still don’t react, we have another weapon: the search engines. Before doing that, find out if the site even turns up in search results – the search engines may have already received DMCA takedowns for the site in question. Go to your favorite search engine and type the name of your blog post in quotes, like this:

“Top 10 Developer Interview Questions About SQL Server”

Look at the search results and find out if the offending site shows up. In the case of InformationFlash, it doesn’t show up – even if I add the word InformationFlash to the search. That’s awesome – Google’s already figured out that the site’s up to no good. In order to send a DMCA notice to a search engine, you have to show that their site will show up in a search for your work.

Each search engine has a different procedure for getting sites delisted:

• Bing’s DMCA Policy
• Google’s DMCA Policy (and there may also be a way to email a DMCA notice to Google)
• Yahoo’s DMCA Policy
• SEOLogic Links to Multiple DMCA Policies

There’s also a sample DMCA notice to search engines that you can use, but make sure to adapt it to each search engine.

Ask for Help From Fellow Bloggers

If you syndicate your blog with SQLServerPedia, email me about the offending site. If you blog at any other site, email the head honcho. All of us are writers, and all of us take plagiarism very, very seriously.

A cynic might ask, “But wait – how is this different than blog syndication at SQLServerPedia?” I’m glad you asked.

• You ask us to syndicate your content. We don’t go poaching content.
• We work with you to set up specialized feeds so that you choose what to syndicate.
• We slather your name all over the place, making it abundantly clear that it’s yours.

If someone takes your syndicated content without your permission, and if you complain to me about it, I will make every effort to go after the offending party with all of the resources available to me. If you want them to syndicate your content straight off your site, that’s completely okay – but they need to take it from your site with your permission, not from SQLServerPedia. You, as a blogger, are completely welcome to syndicate with as many sites as you’d like.

In the case of InformationFlash.com, we’ve already sent them C&D letters, yet they’re still using (y)our content inappropriately. I hate to have to take it to the next step, and I hate to name names in public on my blog. I try to give everyone involved the benefit of the doubt and give them time to do the right thing. If they don’t do the right thing, then I want to make sure the public knows the names of the individuals involved and what they’re doing.

My next post will explain why companies should think twice before hiring individuals who plagiarize intellectual property, whether as full time employees or consultants.

Update 6/27: as I expected, InformationFlash syndicated my content despite the post actually being about InformationFlash stealing content.  Rather awkward.  Here’s a screenshot of their plagiarized content, as well as a screenshot of a blog post they plagiarized from Gail Shaw.  Also note the name of the user who submitted the content – either their admin account has been hacked, or the site’s administrator is responsible for plagiarizing the content.  The top of the page notes that they aggregate information via RSS, but remember that we’ve already sent them a cease & desist once, and they agreed to do it – they’re just not doing it.

Update 6/28: Dreamhost contacted me and said they’re taking the site down due to our DMCA complaints.  It’s not clear whether the takedown is permanent.  I want to thank Dreamhost for acting quickly to protect the intellectual property rights of bloggers.

Update 6/29: I got emails with questions from the site’s webmaster and from a few bloggers, so I added the answers in a followup post with More Thoughts on Blog Plagiarism.

I’ve been joking a lot on Twitter about the passing of the King of Pop.  Somewhere between the Jesus Juice and the Elephant Man, he’d lost a lot of credibility in his fading years.  Earlier in both of our lives, though, things were different.

In middle school when he was at the peak of his popularity, I desperately wanted a red and black leather jacket like his.  I mean, desperately.  I had enough money saved up, and Sears carried one that I could afford.  That right there should tell you everything about my level of style – I aspired to own a piece of clothing carried by the most unhip of 1980s retailers.

My parents, having slightly more taste than me, would not allow me to purchase the jacket.  I was upset, mortified, angry, you name it.  Today, my father sports a diamond earring inspired by Jimmy Buffet – but I digress.

Instead, I ended up buying a large boom box, with which I played songs like Thriller, Bad, and Billie Jean.  Over time, my tastes changed to Huey Lewis and the News, but the King of Pop will always make me wanna get out on the dance floor and perform ill-advised moves that show off my complete lack of physical grace.

So today I’ll be listening to the Essential Michael Jackson collection I just picked up off Amazon MP3 for $17, dancing around the desk, and I won’t stop til I get enough.

Yesterday, Kevin Kline ran across the WeFollow list of top twitterers for the SQL tag and remarked:

I hear that same question privately every now and then, and it’s not that hard.  I’ve got the simple answers to get yourself to the top of the popularity list!

Set Up Searches for Key Phrases

If you’re interested in SQL Server, there are tools you can use like RSS feeds from Search.Twitter.com that will alert you whenever someone mentions SQL Server.  That way you can jump right into their conversation and interrupt help them.  They will surely be impressed by your knowledge and your willingness to help, and they’ll follow you for your insight.

The drawback, though, is that there’s a lot of conversations happening on Twitter at any given time.  It’s seriously hard work to keep up with all of them.  You could devote your time to Twitter searches, or maybe hire a savvy assistant to proactively run your Twitter profile, but sometimes even a human being isn’t enough.  At that point, you’ll want to bring in the machines.

Set Up Robots to AutoRespond For You

Twitter has a cool set of APIs that you can use to build a robot.  Whenever someone mentions a topic, like say SQL Server, you can build an automatic response that says something like:

“I see you’re trying to build a database.  Would you like some help?  I’ll be your best friend.”

If you’re really good with your autoresponses, people will never guess that your witty responses are coming from an automated, heartless piece of software.  Bonus points if they try to carry on a conversation with you, and you have another autoresponse for that.  They’ll line up to follow your Twitter account in no time.  To see an example of a bot in action, check out @joe_kl.

Follow Everybody You Can Find

Go crazy with the Follow button.  Follow anybody and everybody regardless of what they’re talking about.  They might follow you back just out of sheer politeness.

There’s a catch, though: Twitter will yank your account if you follow too many people too fast.  Every few days, go into your Friends page in Twitter, which lists the people you’re following.  You can identify the ones who are following you back because there’s a “Direct Message” link – you can only send DM’s to people who are following you.  Unfollow anybody who doesn’t have a “Direct Message” link next to their name, and presto, it’ll keep your list shorter and let you follow more people.

When you unfollow people, they may get alerted about this if they’re using a service like NutshellMail.  At that point, they’re going to know you’re a bit of a spammer, because they’re going to guess that you followed them just to try to bait them into following you back.  This isn’t a problem at first, but if you try that same trick repeatedly, it pisses off users because they know you’re just an absolute slimeball.  (Doing it even once makes you a slimeball, though.)

Give Stuff Away to People Who Follow You

Announce that once a month, you’re going to pick a random follower and give them something juicy like a gift certificate or a free iPhone.  People will do almost anything for a Klondike bar, I hear.

Once you start, though, it’s like a drug addiction.  If you don’t keep giving things away, people will stop following you, and worse, they’ll start UNfollowing you.  Of course, if you’re in the business of professional marketing, you should have no problem justifying giving away portable hard drives or Macbooks in order to get your spam message out to a larger audience.  Heck, even just the Twitter population as a whole may not be enough, and you may want to…

Send Spam Emails Asking People to Follow You

The majority of humanity isn’t on Twitter yet, so when these measures aren’t enough, it’s time to kick it up a notch.  Send out a broadcast spam email to everyone you can find asking them to join Twitter and follow you.

I’ve been watching the Twitter follower counts of one particular publication who chose to spam me with an invite like this.  I was curious to see if it worked – I had this vision of people saying, “Wow, this is awesome!  I don’t get enough spam through my email client, and it takes so darned long to get it.  I’ll go sign up right now and follow them for up-to-the-minute spam in 140 character chunks!”  Not surprisingly, it doesn’t appear to be working.

Or, Uh, Maybe Just Be Yourself

Maybe I’m old school, but I like to get my followers the old-fashioned way: I earn them.

Don’t follow people just to game the metrics. Unless you’re Ashton Kutcher, nobody really gives a rip how many followers you have.  Twitter is about relationships.  It’s about caring, not calculations.  If you’re out to prove you’ve got the biggest numbers, cut straight to the chase and start giving away free pr0n.

Be yourself, not your company. I follow some company accounts because they have truly kick-ass products.  I want to hear every single bit of news about the cool new stuff they produce.  I work for a company too, but I don’t use my Twitter account as a pimp platform.  If you ask me questions about our products, I’ll be glad to talk with you about it, but not in public on Twitter.  Nobody wants to listen to somebody else buying a used car on Twitter, for example.

Join the conversation. Don’t just spew garbage out automatically – listen, help, and engage.  When you jump into a stranger’s conversation and start blathering about yourself, your opinions or your product, people see through your act.  In meatspace, you can identify the failure of your technique by watching the panicked horror in their facial expression, but on Twitter it’s not so clear.  If the technique doesn’t work in meatspace, it won’t work here either.

Remember that kid in middle school whose mom always sent him in with a bag of cookies trying to make friends?  The one who kept running into you and your buddies and just standing around until he could inject himself into the conversation?  The one that everybody said was trying too hard?  Don’t be That Guy.

Opinion poll time!  I got asked a few questions, and I’m curious about what the rest of you think:

Question 1: How do you feel about Run Book Automation for databases?

Have you used it?  Would you want to?  Why or why not?  If you’ve never done it and never would, please respond too – don’t just be scared off by terms you haven’t heard before.  (I hadn’t heard of it before I came to work for Quest.)

Question 2: Do you have multiple copies of the same database?

Do you have several copies of the same database that you need to keep in sync, whether it’s schema or data?

Question 3: If yes, how do you feel about automated patch and configuration management of databases?

Do you have enough databases that you would consider building a “gold” standard, deploying it, watching for changes, catching out-of-band scenarios, syncing them back to the gold standard, etc.?  Why or why not?

Let me know what you think in the comments.  I’ll hold back my own answers for a couple of days.

I took the StackOverflow database dump, brought it into SQL Server, and did some slicing and dicing by tags and users.  I wanted to find the answers to questions like:

• What are the most active tags?
• Who is submitting the most answers?
• Who is getting the most answers accepted?
• What tag answers get the highest scores?
• What tags get answered the fastest or slowest?
• Which types of questions are closed the most often?
• What tags are the high-reputation people answering?

I’m having a lot of fun with the data, and I thought other people might enjoy it too.

To make it easier, I built SPWho2.com, a site with StackOverflow user and tag statistics.  It’s not terribly attractive yet, unless like me, you find numbers attractive.  It’s a side hobby for me right now, and over time I’ll add in more data visualization with graphs and trends.  If there’s anything you’d like to see added, let me know.