Featured Article(s)
Initialize to the day beginning
(Vadivel Mohanakrishnan) This article explains the various ways of initializing a variable to the beginning of a day. Target audience for this is ‘Beginners to Intermediate’ level of readers.
Tomorrow: New SelectViews show
Today: [Watch] the current SelectViews here. Open source gotcha, discussion list watch, events and a LOT more…
SQL Server Fortune Teller (Sort of)
Of course you’ve heard about the Microsoft/Yahoo news of acquisition talks between the two. But, if you’ve been read this newsletter or the site for a bit, you actually knew about this nearly four years ago! I reported on this way back in 2004 – not too bad, eh? See, just keep reading and I’ll do my best to keep you up to date with the happenings in the tech world – sometimes even before they happen! Read the original posting here. (er, just ignore the date and the whole Google mention…)
SQL Server 2008 Slippage Feedback
I’ve had a really strong response to the SQL Server 2008 question – basically, are you OK with the slip, do you care, do you plan on it, or are your plans more project-centric and less version-centered these days?
The response was overwhelmingly one of "if it takes longer to build a product with fewer bugs, please hold the product and continue development work." While I do understand this, I’m interested too to hear what you think of SQL Server now that you’ve perhaps seen both sides of the development approach. First, from 2000 to 2005, the vast majority said it was too long between releases. In fact, the most frequently named time period that I’d heard was 2-3 years between releases.
Now that we’re there, the 2-3 years between releases mark, it seems like we’re finding that that’s too frequent to work with on a release basis – it takes about that much time to update servers, then you’re faced with another impending version update. I’ll run comments this week on this whole topic – I’ve heard from DBAs, software developers and many others – but I’d like to hear from you too – what do you think is the "right" amount of time, or should we go for the "whenever it’s ready" and just approach it as a thing of installing the release that’s current for any given project as it gets to be time for deployment?
Drop me a note here, let me know…
Featured White Paper(s)
Making Databases Explorable
This paper looks at common difficulties encountered when maintaining a large number of databases and how the products in the … (read more)
The High Performance DBA: Optimizing Databases for High Performance
The combination of a cross-platform environment, added database complexity, more data, and less head count has become a real c… (read more)