No Tickets Online

I noted last week the Olympic ticketing system crashed. Apparently China isn't going to bother trying again and will move to a lottery system.

It's probably a fairer way to distribute tickets, but I hope the IT guys are still working on building a more robust and scalable system for the actual Olympics.

Copyright

I like to see information, ideas, and content available for people to be used by them, to inspire them, to be there as a base on which they can grow their own thoughts and ideas. However as an author, I also think that I should have some control over how my work is used and how I derive income from it. This is a battle that's going on between content producers and distributors and the public, most often seen with the music downloading/Napster/RIAA lawsuits and arguments.

However this week there was a plan presented in a speech at the New Media conference to try and come up with a balance between copyright holders and the public. It's an interesting speech and it addresses some of the issues with fair use while still respecting the general rights of copyright holders. There's also a fantastic speech from Lawrence Lessig in a similar vein.

I'm still in favor of lowering copyright terms back to something in the 20-50 year range, but even with a reform like that, we need an expansion of fair use and better definitions of how it should be applied. Think about putting your own works under a Creative Commons license.

SQL Server 2008

The word I've been hearing is that CTP5 is due to release very soon. It's possible it will even drop between when I wrote this (Friday) and when you read it (Monday). It's supposed to be very feature complete in almost every area, especially the spatial data types.

I still think the release cycle is too short, and I still recommend jumping from 2000 to 2008 if you haven't already upgraded, however I don't think I'll be able to change the cycle, so I'll try to give you as much information as I can about both 2005 and 2008 moving forward.

We're starting to see more blogging about 2008, so if you're interested in what's changing, keep reading here every week.

Diving into T-SQL

With a few conferences going on around the world, there are some cool blog postings this week on T-SQL and SQL Server, so I'd urge you to flip through them. The "Conference Question" series from Paul Randal is one set I'd really recommend and there are a couple nice postings on CTEs from Craig Freedman at Microsoft.

The Subsystems

As I've been doing this Database Weekly newsletter for about 3 years, I've noticed a few things about the distribution of posts and blogs. I've tended to see a lot on Integration Services and relatively few on other subsystems. I think that's just a measure of how popular, or maybe how useful, SSIS has been.

However over the last few weeks, I've noticed there are less and less SSIS postings. I'm sure this can't be because everything is known about SSIS. Maybe it's because my SSIS expert, Jamie Thomson, has been working incredibly hard down in Houston and hasn't had time to blog. Or maybe he just misses rainy, old England.

Are you using SSIS more or less? Are any of you out there hung up on DTS? Is DTS still preventing you from upgrading to SQL Server 2005? If so, I'd like to know and I'll give a short plug here to a business partner of mine. Brian Knight, SQL Server MVP and author of quite a few SQL Server DTS and SSIS books, has been working on a product to help you convert those DTS packages to SSIS and he's had some great success. You might want to check him out at Pragmatic Works - DTS Xchange.

SPAM Issues

Lastly, we've had a few SPAM issues with this newsletter and we're trying to track things down. If you get this newsletter and run Exchange (especially 2003), please let me know (webmaster at databaseweekly.com). I'm a little concerned that my weekly efforts are in vain 🙂

Steve Jones

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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.

The RSS Feed:

or now on iTunes!

• Video Podcast - 10.7MB Quicktime
• Video Podcast - 12.3MB WMV
• Audio Podcast - 5.6MB 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 like it, tell the boss!