October 25, 2006 at 8:32 am
I have a vendor supplied solution (from Siemens) so I have to get their permission to use this product. Maybe if I could have simply downloaded the white paper I would have, and forwarded it on to Siemens. But if I have to work that hard to get a white paper, I assume I will have to work even harder to get their sales people off my back if Siemens says no.
Remember what it takes to cancel AOL. I don't think any of us has time for that crap.
October 25, 2006 at 8:43 am
i forwarded it on to our dba as they are looking for new back up and restore options. i did not download it though
October 25, 2006 at 9:11 am
I suspected it was the pricing/demographic issue and most of you have confirmed that. I agree that vendors try too hard to get contact info. I understand why, but it's counter productive. Maybe this will convince them to provide the download with no red tape! I think your comments would make good reading for all vendors.
For those of you who didn't receive the special newsletter (or who do not wish to) there is a checkbox on the profile page that controls the subscription:
"I wish to receive occasional email offers (no more than one per month) from vendors that advertise on SQLServerCentral.com. These offers will be sent from SQLServerCentral.com directly - we do not share your email address with anyone! Many vendors struggle to clearly communicate what their product does effectively in the small ads we allow on the site - this gives them a chance to use an entire page to really showcase their capabilities. We screen these heavily and only send those that we truly think will be of interest to you. "
If it's checked already and you didn't get the message drop Steve a note (webmaster@) and we'll try to see what went wrong.
October 25, 2006 at 9:18 am
I didn't receive the announcement.
Best regards, Randy
October 25, 2006 at 9:19 am
I used Double-Take at my last job for both HA and to implement a nightly-refreshed reporting copy of the OLTP DBs. Overall, it was a good experience, allowing us to implement these "Enterprise" architectures with the Standard Edition of SQL 2k at a significant savings over switching to Enterprise Edition.
With SQl Server 2005's enterprise features creeping further down the edition ladder, it's bound to be a rougher ride for Double-Take, but they have a decent paper that attempts to argue why and where DT still fits in. It even includes a quote from MS.
October 25, 2006 at 9:44 am
Email was not received or blocked by spam blocker.
October 25, 2006 at 10:47 am
I recieved the email, but hate giving out contact information in order to get any kind of pricing, then you get some sales guy hounding you for months
October 25, 2006 at 12:51 pm
I believe their trying to use number of downloads as a metric of success is flawed. While I appreciate their wanting to capture user information so they can spam us later, that is a turn-off for many - myself included.
I think they have forgotten one of the basic tenants of marketing - impressions. Putting up roadblocks (registration), lacking certain information (pricing) are things that will only limit impressions. They should concentrate on getting their product and message in front of as many people as possible - remove all roadblocks. The idea of capturing email addresses as a pre-req is flawed (IMHO).
October 25, 2006 at 1:13 pm
We did an in-depth analysis of Double-take, and ruled it out for the following reasons:
1) Database latency. Double-take can only replicate what is written to disk. Since checkpoint only runs every two minutes or so, what is on disk is also 2 minutes old. Therefore what gets replicated is also about two minutes old. In the event of a failover to the backup you WILL lose about 2 minutes of database activity. Double-Take confirmed this to us.
2) There is no database "isolation". Corruption written to disk on the source server, get written to all target servers. Not good. So instead of one broken database, you now have them all broken.
3) Not possible to perform database admin. If you need to do something to the database, that requires exclusive access to it, then you cannot do it without either losing data (by switching to the backup), or experiencing downtime (by kicking all the users off). But wait a minute... as all databases will need the same maintanence performing on them (as they are all identical), you will never be able to fix the problem.
4) There is no guarentee that the backup databases are ok. The backup (or target) servers must have SQL server shutdown for DoubleTake to do it's stuff. If SQL server is started on a target, then the DoubleTake replication will stop. Unless you start SQL server on a target, then how do you know that the backup is ok? In some environments this os maybe acceptable, in ours we have to know 100% that our backup database has full integrity.
5) The failover time is indeterminate. The failover time is determined by the length of time it takes SQL server to start, and then checkpoint the backup database. In theory it should take seconds. It could also take minutes or even hours. According to DoubleTake, the norm. is about 90 seconds.
Apart from all of the above, DoubleTake is just great 🙂
October 25, 2006 at 1:34 pm
I'll tell ya what happened for me when I got this message.
1. I opened the email as I always do when it comes from this site.
2. I began to read the information like I always do.
3. About half way through I realised it was an advertisement
4. I got wicked pissed off that one of my favorite sites was now spamming me.
5. I deleted the email and vowed never to look at Double-Take software again.
6. I sent an angry email to someone at SQL Server Central.
So, in my case, you actually prevented someone from going to thier site. I would suspect mnay others felt the same way. I don't mind the ads in the newsletter, but seperate emails for the sole purpose of advertising really annoy me.
October 25, 2006 at 1:50 pm
Jasmine,
Im sorry that you're angry about the email. I'll talk to Steve and see if we can't more clearly distinguish from our daily newsletter mailing, we are certainly not trying to deceive anyone that this particular mailing is all advertising. As I noted in an earlier post you can modify you newsletter options in the 'My Profile' page so that you won't get these if you find no value in them.
We've been doing these once a month mailings for some time and overall we've had a good response, both in terms of our readers appreciating the vendors attempt to make their case and in the way that we've elected to let vendors make their case. Advertising pays the bills here, and in this case we do allow members to opt out. Maybe someday we'll be in a position that we can let readers opt out of more types of advertising, but we're not there yet.
I'd hate to think you would punish Double-Take because you don't agree with our advertising policy. They chose to advertise with us to try to provide DBA's with one more option to choose from, and of course based on our explanation of our how our advertising works.
And, I hope we have enough goodwill built up with you that you'll adjust your profile as you see fit and continuing visiting us in the future.
October 25, 2006 at 2:13 pm
It is the first one I have gotten and I was not aware of the option to turn those off. It's possible that my previous copies of ads got picked up by the spam filter. I did have to 'whitelist' the newsletter.
I still love the site, and will continue to use it every day. This site, yahoo mail, netzero mail, and myspace are the 4 sites I go to every day. This site is the only one that I visit because I want to. Those others I have to visit to keep up with my messages.
October 25, 2006 at 4:08 pm
I fall into the category of "didn't look because I don't have a need for the product". If I was looking for something like it, I would fall into the "registration? Forget it!!" category.
But there's no need to get mad at anyone. I signed up to sqlservercentral.com, and if I never noticed the opt-out or never bothered to set it then that's my fault. I feel I get great value from this site for free, and I'm not confused about who pays for it.
If I need a SQL-related product this is one of the first places I'll go, and I have patronized some of your advertisers in the past. If nothing else, at least DoubleTake accomplished making me aware that they exist if I have a need in the future.
October 25, 2006 at 4:21 pm
I didn't take much notice of the product because as a developer, backups etc are not part of my responsibility and there are backups in place. I think the initial email should also have had a cute graphic diagram and mention price.
October 25, 2006 at 5:22 pm
To everyone, thanks for the feedback and taking the time to respond. We appreciate all the comments, good and bad and they help us to decide on what changes we make to the site.
Steve
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