Building on a Budget

Wikipedia runs a large site that serves lots, and lots of requests. In fact, they get a decent number from me when I'm researching editorials and my kids think "everything" is on Wikipedia, their first site of choice for looking things up.

They have a nice article on their infrastructure, which includes 80,000 queries / sec. That's a pretty high load, higher than I've worked on for one service. However unlike Google, Microsoft, and others, they don't have a huge budget to spend on hardware. It's an interesting look at how they do a lot with a little and might be something those smaller companies out there should think about.

The Impedance Mismatch

There's a war going on about the Entity Framework v1 and what some people consider issues with its implementation. I'm not really sure technically what's important and what's a problem, but I do know a few things. One is that any "new" technology isn't completely thought out. Some of the pros and cons I've seen written about EF are similar to what I saw on .NET, especially ASP.NET, VB, and other technologies in the past. At this point, NO ONE has really used the technology that much and can't say for sure what's best, what's needed, and what problems might occur. It takes years for the technology to mature and application to grow and succeed for fail over time.

I did see agreat blog post from Stephen Forte that I think has a great point. All these technologies to make life easier for developers, especially the object based ones, should be moving closer to the database not further away. I know this isn't the path of least resistance and most profit, but it's the one I think we should move towards.

SQL Server 2008

It's getting close. I know we've heard this before, but I'm starting to see quite a few Connect items marked as "will not get fixed by RTM", meaning that it's too close to the end for these items to be fixed. I even heard about a bug that was fixed, but it couldn't be included in the final build, which is in testing. Apparently only critical bugs (data loss, large scale effect) will get fixed right now.

That's good and bad. It seems like SQL Server 2005 hasn't been out that long, but we're closing on 3 years. And with SQL Server 2000 (mainstream) support done, there are lots of people needing to think about upgrading to either 2005 or 2008 (hint, choose 2008).

Lots of blog posts and more and more articles are appearing on the new version. This week I saw some interesting ones on Auditing, Powershell, XML changes, TDE, and more. I'd check those out and see if there's a feature in there that might make a compelling business case for your enterprise.

Steve Jones

Steve's Pick of the Week

Unusual data center access - I am not really sure what to write here, but it's pretty funny. At the very least it's worth checking out the image.

The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

The podcast feeds are now available at sqlservercentral.podshow.com to get better bandwidth and maybe a little more exposure :). Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.

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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.

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