The News of the Week
I'm trying something a bit different this week, being stuck in a hotel room in Indianapolis. I was talked into coming for the IndyTechFest 2008 and running a panel, so I'm doing this editorial on the fly.
This week saw a change in the blogs at SQLServerCentral and a few new bloggers. One great new addition is Phil Factor, the well known columnist for Simple Talk. This week he had a great piece on parsing strings that you might want to check out.
The SQL Server PSS Engineers have a great blog where they post information about interesting problems people call Microsoft about. This week they talked about a few places where the Windows Scalable Networking Pack, which is enabled if you apply Windows 2003 SP 2, can cause performance issues with SQL Server. Definitely recommended for production DBAs to read.
With all the problems in our financial systems this week, I saw a few articles on the impact to IT workers. The bottom line, as I mentioned last week, is that there will definitely be more people seeking jobs, many of them from the financial sectors, but most companies don't expect IT spending to drop in 2009 to less than 2008 levels. I'm not sure I believe that and we'll see.
Outsourcing accounts for many data thefts, no surprise there. You need to trust the people using your data and every time you use another company, you reduce the trust levels.
Oracle and HP introduced "The Database Machine", at a nice US$2mm, with 168TB of storage. Wow. It has "advanced compression" to reduce database sizes by 3/4 un warehouse applications. Surprisingly it sounds like what SQL Server 2008 has, though prepackaged for large customers.
With a large pricetag.
Steve Jones
Pick of the Week
The SQL Server Experience - A new site launched for SQL Server 2008 with lots of video and textual information about the new product. It's a marketing site, but they've put the information in 11 languages, so you can now get marketing data in your native toungue
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.
or now on iTunes!
- Windows Media Podcast - 32.1MB WMV
- iPod Video Podcast - 23MB MP4
- MP3 Audio Podcast - 4.7MB
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.