The Weekly Editorial

You might have noticed over the last few weeks that I'm not doing the editorials all the time. Tony Davis, my co-editor here and editor of Simple Talk, has been strong-armed, err, agreed to take on half the responsibilities here. So he's doing every other week, giving me a bit of a break from the grind of doing 6 editorials and podcasts a week.

So let him know what you think about his efforts and maybe give him some encouragement to do his own podcasts 🙂

SQL Server 2008

No news on a new CTP, though the guess is probably the February time frame, most likely before the "launch event" (are they still going through with that?). I'm not sure what will be coming out in this CTP, but look for more features to be included.

I have seen a few posts on Hot-Add CPUs, including one from Paul Randal (former storage engine lead). It's an interesting idea, though you need a 64-bit server and Enterprise editions of Windows and SQL (or data center). I think as more and more companies buy larger machines, probably 32 or 64 way machines and run some type of hypervisor, this is a really interesting way to move resources from say a QA or test VM on your machine to a production VM for SQL Server.

Assuming you can remove those resources as a "hot-subtract" as well.

Playing Nice

One of the things that I really try to preach in my writings on career issues is that you should be sure that you act professionally as much as possible. That especially means getting along with others you work with, both inside and outside your company.

I sense some frustration from Dan Jones, one of the program managers for SQL Server, in his how to get your bug fixed blog post this past week. He talks about prioritizing the bugs and deciding which ones get fixed.

There are some suggestions for getting them fixed, which usually means more detail. That seems to imply to me that they want you to do more work and they'll give a higher priority to those people that do more work for Microsoft instead of them doing the work. Not what I want to hear from them, especially I hate Connect and don't want to do a lot of work on that system, but I understand it. I'm sure he is a fan since it saves him and his team a lot of work.

However he does have a note about being respectful in your post. I can imagine how upset peoplet get and what they'll put in a post. Heck, I provide a fairly free service here and I get some nasty emails from people. I certainly understand them not wanting to work on bugs when someone's cursed or insulted them. I wouldn't blame them for just throwing those entries away and waiting for someone more polite to resubmit them.

Despite what you think about the code quality of the SQL Server platform, the guys and gals working on it are just like you and I. They're working for a living, they take pride in what they do, and they don't want to hear they've built a POS when they're doing their best. If you're upset about something, especially upset enough to curse, write it down in a text file and let it sit for a few hours at least. Then revisit it and provide a professional response, just like the kind you'd like to get about the software you're building.

Encrypting with Certificates

I'd done a lot of research and testing of encryption in SQL Server 2005 for the various exam books I'd worked on last year, but I hadn't see this one in any of the documentation I'd read. An asymmetric key has a limited amount of data it can encrypt.

And it's not much. a 512 bit key can encrypt only 53 bytes.

I don't know about you, but that doesn't cover something like names in my systems. There's a great post from Laurentiu Cristofor that talks about why you shouldn't encrypt data with certificates, which are asymmetric keys. This is one of his reasons, among others, that you should only use symmetric encrypion on data and save the certificates for encrypting the symmetric keys.

Steve Jones

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**Steve's Pick of the Week**
Bill Gates' Last Day at Microsoft - Bill Gates has always been willing to make fun of himself as the chairman of Microsoft and it's always made him seem more like a real person to me. Here's a great spoof video of Bill, driving to work, in the gym, making a rap video and more.

The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

Incompetech

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.

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or now on iTunes!

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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The Weekly Editorial