One of the goals of SQLServerCentral was to provide lots of great information to the community in a low noise manner. As such, we try to keep the articles and discussions straightforward and limit the amount of marketing and fluff you receive. It's one reason we have had few white papers on our site over the years since so many of them seem to be more marketing than informative.
As the site as evolved, we have also limited advertising on the site. We have never really allowed advertising or promotions in the forums since vendors often seem to annoy users with their posts. They seem to feel that if they post once and get a good response that posting 100 times should get them a great response. It doesn't, and my inbox tends to fill with complaints. So I remove advertising posts.
However I think tools are valuable and the vendors out there can save you time and resources with their products. With our limited advertising policy at this time, I'm looking for a way to allow the community to interact with vendors, get news and information about products and offer feedback. So I thought I'd make this a Friday poll.
How would you like to learn about new products, features, enhancements, and ask questions?
I know the commercials, advertisements, interruptions can be annoying. The internet has seemingly allowed us to choose what we want to consume, when we want it, and from a variety of sources. No longer are we locked into the limited news information from our local sources, but we also have lost many great magazines, and even newspapers that I have enjoyed because of the low effectiveness of advertising in those channels.
Companies that make products support many of our efforts. Without that support, we often don't have MSDN events, SQL Saturdays, or even the PASS Summit. Yet companies are second guessing that support and the value they get from sponsoring these events. To some extent that is their problem to solve, but they are a part of our community, and I'd like to help them. Many of them are friends of mine and I do believe they offer value back to the community with their products.
Think about the value that you've gotten from third party products. Think about the problems you've solved, or the help you've gotten from a backup tool, an editor, or a performance product. How would you like to learn about enhancements. What's a high impact, low interruption way of communicating with you? Let us know this Friday.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
The podcast feeds are available at sqlservercentral.mevio.com. Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.
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Today's podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.