Featured Article(s)
Understanding Failover Clusters
Vanitha Vaidialingam – This article attempts to define for newbie users the concepts of failover clustering and the types of failover clustering and the benefits of using them.
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Microsoft Performance Point Server
I’m a tad bit nervous about this one, frankly. I’ve been following Performance Point Server for a bit now and it’s nearly ready for release. PPS (my acronym, not necessarily official) will be used to pull meaningful information from your database system and integrate that information with Office applications.
Why would I be nervous about that?
It’s Yet Another Layer (YAL) in the quest to pull information from your database. I had thought SharePoint services were targeting this area and that things would just live in there to make all the pieces talk to each other and make them able to be more easily used. I had thought that the whole concept of the "servers" for Excel and the like would live in SharePoint and then provide the integration, reporting and so-on directly within SharePoint.
I’ll be the first to tell you that I don’t understand all the pieces, but YIKES! YAL. Do we need another layer to pull information from the database and use it in another (Office) application? PPS sounds great (read more here), but dang, let’s get back to just getting things going. To me, in my currently blissfully ignorant state on this, it seems like really cool products are built, then it comes time to make them usable for the masses, so an interface layer is built. Then the whole thing repeats. We have so many layers to go through to get the functionality that the challenge becomes not getting at the information, but navigating the layers and products needed to get there from here.
I’m all for integration. I’m all for better interfaces for reporting, querying, analysis and monitoring. Bring it on – these are indeed good, needed things. But we’ve done Excel solutions, SharePoint solutions and many other things. If it’s a case of learning and moving forward, OK, but doesn’t that mean we should be looking to remove and condense layers too – to make it less complex to get the work done?
I’ll stop – and please, if I’m WAY off base here, let me know. I’d love to know how I’ve missed the boat, and I’ll be the first to admit it here if that’s the case.
Featured White Paper(s)
Microsoft T-SQL Performance Tuning Part 1: Analyzing and Optimizing T-SQL Query Performance on Microsoft SQL Server using SET and DBCC
This white paper, authored by SQL Server expert Kevin Kline, discusses the basics of indexes, such as density and selectivity… (read more)
Business Rule Mining: Get a Detailed Analysis of your COBOL Applications
LogicMiner can help your organization reduce maintenance costs and prepare for ongoing modernization of legacy applications. … (read more)
Database Change Management and Version Control
An automated methodology is a complete end-to-end solution for database change management and version control, which minimise… (read more)