Some quick hits on the news of the week from the perspective of a DBA.
CTP5
It's out, or it should be by the time you get this. It was on Connect for some people and should appear on MSDN by Monday. Intellisense and more as documented by daniel_walzenbach. This has been a long time in coming, but it's still missing stuff. I heard there's no cluster support, though I'm not sure you want to run a cluster on beta software. There are definitely people that need to test this stuff, so hopefully that's coming soon.
If you're testing against 2005 with the idea of upgrading, I'd really grab this CTP and re-run your tests against that. Without time critical reasons to upgrade, you might want to just hold off for SQL Server 2008.
Tempdb?
How about a 1.6TB solid state drive for your tempdb? Or data. or logs, or any part of your database server.
This is actually a series of 16GB drives that are stacked togethre, but it's a preview of things to come. An 8GB USB key is running about US$100 now, and that's for a low speed flash drive. I predict that at some point in the next 7 years we'll see Solid State Disks (SSDs) available on most servers we buy.
More cool posts
Conference season continues, with Paul Randal and Kim Trip in Barcelona. Check out some interesting posts on mirroring. There are also a couple security related posts that talk about issues with encrypted databases from Laurentiu Cristofor. Check them out if you use encryption and you might want to subscribe to his blog.
Non Competes
There was a question about a non-compete argeement that got posted to Slashdot (and eWeek comment) and prompted quite a few issues with the process. It's an interesting debate and you might want to check it out, but personally I think that a company should have the right to a non-compete over some length of time.
However it should be spelled out clearly in which areas you can't compete and it needs to allow sufficient freedom for the employee to continue to work elsewhere. I'll write a bit more on that as I've been involved in an internal debate about these things. Comments are welcome.
Corporate Blogging
Is it a good idea? Can you make it work? I had someone contact me about policies for their corporate blog since they wanted to get started, and I'm sorry to say that I haven't seen a good policy. This week there was an article about corporate blogging as a way to transfer information. I'm not sure that's the best way and I can see this scheme falling apart.
First a blog is raw, it's unedited, it's quick, dirty, and provides a way to publish stuff without the overhead of an editor and publisher. If you add those guys in, which you need to do for CEOs and anyone distributing official information, then you're publishing an article, press release, or memo. Do that, set up an RSS feed, and call it what it is.
Second, I think for knowledge sharing, you're better off with an internal WIKI that consolidates stuff together from multiple people. Blogs are one to many, and they're self promoting. Not that I don't want to see them, but I don't see them as a corporate communication vehicle.
Wanna work here?
I appplaud Sun's efforts to save energy. It might be just marketing that's driving them, but they're really making an effort. In fact, they're looking to build a data center in a mine. With their Blackbox product, they'll put 10,000 cores down there and use the natural temperatures and ground water to keep things cool.
However I'm not working there. It's not a bad idea to reuse some of these facilities and maybe we'll see West Virginia become a computing powerhouse with all their mines, but there's no way I'm working in one. My kids laughed at me when I stopped about 50ft inside an old gold mine here in Colorado.
Fine by me; I was at my limit.
News and Podcast Notes
Just a quick reminder, this week is Thanksgiving, so I'm putting out my Jedi Mind Trick abliities to make it a slow SQL Server news week. You will not blog until after the 24th of November; you have no need to blog until after the 24th of November.
I'll be in the mountains on vacation next weekend and I'm not sure we'll get a podcast done, so don't count on one. Maybe some skiing footage 🙂
Steve Jones
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Next Generation PC Design - an interesting contest by Microsoft. Personally I kind of like the bookshelf PC, especially if we can "dock" items like USB drives, iPods, etc. If you've got some creativity, submit something. |
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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!
- Video Podcast - 7.0MB Quicktime
- Video Podcast - 13.9MB WMV
- Audio Podcast - 6.7MB 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.