Some quick hits on the news of the week from the perspective of a DBA. Surprisingly there was more news than I was expecting between Christmas and New Years.
Interviewing
I've actually written an editorial talking about managing your career at SQLServerCentral.com on a similar topic, but I thought I'd point out that part 3 of Dennis Gobo's interviewing series is on his blog. I'm not sure I completely agree with his hints, but I don't think they'll hurt. And they're a good idea if they help you in anyway. I wouldn't wear a suit to an interview because I wouldn't wear one to work. However I do ask about the dress code over the phone and I wear something clean and appropriate.
I definitely like his notes about researching the company and not asking questions about what the company does and other information easily determined from a few Google searches. And of course, work on your skills as he mentions.
SQL Server 2008
Looks like some of the experts didn't take much time off over the holidays. I found a lot of blogs this week talking about SQL Server 2008 from various people in the industry. I'll point out a few on query plans from Bob Beauchemin of SQLSkills that I thought were very interesting. If you're looking forward to gaining a bit more control over your query plans, I'd check out his entries.
Cumulative Update 5
I must say that I'm impressed with the SQL teams delivery of cumulative updates, post SP2, for SQL Server 2005. Since they started in the spring, I think they've been pretty close to their every other month release of an update. It's something I've asked for from the Service Pack team for a long time and with this process in place, I'm not sure why we need Service Packs. Just give us patches 6 times a year.
The latest one was released just before Christmas, and you can see all of them on my tracking page (SQL Server 2005 Build List). This week a lot of the KB articles whose fixes are in this patch are listed in the update. I'd urge you to flip through them and be sure that you aren't experiencing any issues and get that update tested and applied.
Google as a Monopoly
I said this back when Netscape was huge and Microsoft was hated, and again now. I think Google is no better, and potentially worse, than Microsoft. So much of our information access is shaded by Google since they are the search engine of choice for most people, including myself. While I think their searches are becoming less relevant with all the holding pages that use AdWords and so many retail sites, they still do a better job than Live or Yahoo.
However there was an article last week on the Google Monopoly that I found interesting. Check it out and let me know what you think. If they get to buy DoubleClick then we might have an issue. I think that Google does some nice things, like working with energy, I also think they're becoming more profit driven and that forces more and more of their little groups to take chances and try to control whole segments of the Internet. They've done a number on advertising and I'm not sure I want them controlling lots more data in Groups, GMail, and other applications they're building.
Hope everyone had a great holiday and Happy New Year!
Steve Jones
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The Best Money-Saving Technologies of 2007 - Not sure about Unified Communucations, at least from the employee point of view. It could easily lead to abuse of the real-time communications, but check out the others and see if you're implementing some of these technologies. Virtualization and going green are the ones I'd recommend. |
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The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
The podcast feeds are now available on the Podshow network at voiceofthedba.com to get better bandwidth and maybe a little more exposure :). Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.
or now on iTunes!
- Quicktime Podcast - 29.1MB MOV
- Windows Media Video Podcast - 22.2MB WMV
- iPod Video Podcast - 10.6MB MP4
- Audio Podcast - 4.8MB MP3
Today's podcast features music by Incompetech. Kevin Macleod has some great compositions in all genres of music. Check him out at www.incompetech.com.
I really appreciate and value feedback on the podcasts. Let us know what you like, don't like, or even send in ideas for the show. If you'd like to comment, post something here. The boss will be sure to read it.
