Traditionally, the time between Christmas and New Years is a bit slow. Many people take time off from work and, for those of us still working, it’s a good time to catch up on all of those low priority projects that have been on the back burner for the last several months.
If you find yourself with a few extra hours, why not engage in some first-hand learning with the new features of SQL Server 2008 R2? Here are two great resources to get you started.
First, take a look at betaforsqlserver.com, a partnership between MaximumASP, Dell, PASS, and Microsoft. When you register, you get your own sandbox SQL Server 2008 R2 including support for .NET and PHP, along with Reporting Services, Analysis Services, and Integration Services. It almost makes me believe that there is such a thing as a free lunch!
Second, why not try your hand at one of the most exciting new features in SQL Server 2008 R2, PowerPivot for Excel? You can play with it to your heart’s content at the new Microsoft Virtual Labs, another great service for learning in real albiet sandbox VM Hyper-V labs.
I know in my own case, it’s often tough to find a free server somewhere where I can set up and install the sandbox environment. On top of that, even during a slow week, I rarely enjoy spending my time configuring an entire environment. Why not solve both problems at once with this fast and easy method of learning the news features?
In the Sequels for SQL series, I point you to sites where you can go beyond the nose-to-the-grindstone resources that we see every day as SQL Server professionals. (My favorite resource for pan-SQL Server pointers is Steve Jone’s Database Weekly email newsletter.) These are the story that comes after and outside (the sequels) of our daily working lives (the other SQL). Let’s broaden our horizons together. If you hit on an interesting but overlooked topic, I’d like to hear from you.
SQL Server: We live it. We love it.
When Jimmy May talks, I listen. Not just because he’s a personal friend, but also because he knows what’s what, if you’ll pardon the expression. So when Jimmy says “I believe xPerf will fundamentally change the way I do my job”, then I want to know what the heck this free xPerf management tool is and how I can best leverage it. Check out Jimmy’s blog entry on xPerf here.
Devices & Gadgets: Usually making our lives better, sometimes not so much.
Ever wonder what’s inside one of those tiny USB hard drives? No? Not even a little bit?!? When I started in IT, hard drives where as big as washing machines and cost $60,000 running at speeds in the 100′s of RPMs. My how times have changed. Here’s a fun hack of a USB hard drive – http://www.dansworkshop.com/electricity-and-electronics/usb-hard-drive-hack.htm.
Futurewatch: Important issues just over the horizon.
There are a lot of standard elements of society being rebranded as the “2.0″ version of itself. The 2.0 moniker was first put forward by visionary Tim O’Reilly (blog | twitter), of the eponymous media company. Whenever you see the 2.0 moniker added to the end of something, most famously Web 2.0, then you know that it will include the characteristics of collaboration, interoperability, and user-centered designs. So, whereas the first go at the web in the mid- to late-1990′s was about enabling information retrieval such as transforming printed catalogs into on-line catalogs, Web 2.0 enables all of its participants to comment on, review, rate, and otherwise participating with each other in the use of such a catalog. In the last FutureWatch blurb, I pointed out work on Grid 2.0, centered on efforts to update the USA’s electricity grid. I’m going to do a much more detailed post in the near future about emerging 2.0 efforts, but one to point out now is Gov 2.0. Under this broad set of initiatives, governments from the lowest to highest levels of responsibility are opening up their public databases for consumption by the public. An example of Gov 2.0 in action comes with the President’s SAVE Award, in which the public is invited to vote on their pick for the best money saving tip put forward by federal government workers. Read all about this year’s SAVE Award here.
Humor: I haz da funny.
Weird products in Japan have their own name – chindogu. Most of these are crackpot inventions that everyone knows will never see the light of day, such as these these featured here. However, some of these products DO get marketed and, more amazingly, purchased. Check out the product reviews of this totally bizarro chindogu here at Overstock.com.
Professional Development: Because there are two words in “database professional”.
There are mountains of great websites with tips on how to be a better speaker. Some day, I’ll write a long blog post about my favorite sites for learning how to improve your oration. But if you’re in a hurry, and who isn’t these days, then this blog post at TechRepublic succinctly sums up the advice you’ll find from many other web sites, articles, and blogs.
Society: Important issues to discuss with your friends and family.
One of the most remarkable things about the USA, as a rather biased citizen, is our ability to suck up our pride, admit a mistake, and try to prevent it from happening again. One way that the USA tries to prevent future occurrences is to convene a commission of some kind. I found this analysis by David Leinweber, a Haas Fellow in Finance and Founding Director of the Center for Innovative Financial Technology at UC Berkeley, on the commission studying banking market reform in the USA to be quite intriguing and, frankly, upsetting.
WorldView: If James Bond knows that the world is not enough, then so should I.
I’m always on the lookout for issues related to safe and clean water. If you think people can be grumpy when oil is in short supply, imagine what it’s like when there’s not enough drinking water for everyone. See how India is dealing with enormous water issues in this revealing article from the Economist. And I’d be interested to hear what our Indian blogger friends thoughts are on this topic, folks like Rushabh Mehta, Jacob Sebastian, and Pinal Dave. (Water issues have remained one of my passions ever since my years working for NASA developing the water recycling systems for the International Space Station, in which we made water of the H20 that passes through the human body re-drinkable. And it tastes good. Incidentally, all of the technology we developed for this project, as with all non-classified government projects, became public domain. ECLSS technology is now used in hundreds of commercial products ranging from household detergents to commercial solvents to filtration systems.)
Check out my new Tool Time column in this month’s SQL Server Magazine. It features some great new PowerShell scripts and information from Chad Miller (blog) who I had the pleasure to meet in person back in October of this year while speaking at the SQL Server of central Florida and at SQL Saturday #21.
In addition, I’d like to point out a free utility called PowerGUI. If you’re like me, the last thing you have time for is learning a new code like PowerShell. So I copped out and got the next best alternative to real code, the fancy and pretty drag-n-drop interface of PowerGUI. (Full disclosure: PowerGUI is made by Quest Software, my employer, but by an unrelated business unit.) Notice that the hyperlink is to a .ORG website. That’s because PowerGUI is not only free, it’s also community-supported. There are tons of free scripts for all sorts of Windows-related technologies like Exchange, Active Directory, and of course SQL Server. Give a look and let me know what you think of it.
I’ve been seeing more and more questions from customers about data deduplication technologies. I guess that’s because I can’t open a blog, website, or email related to technology without some vendor or another pushing the wonders of data deduplication. Consequently, I thought I’d take a few minutes to describe what the technology is all about. I’ll sum up my thoughts on the the value of deduplication technology by saying “It depends”. Read my article entry at Database Trends & Applicationsmagazine here.
If someone in your company is pushing you to examine this very expensive technology, please give my article a gander and let me know what you think. I also encourage you to take a look at Brent Ozar’s excellent post on the topic located here. Remember that when in the right hands, as with all technologies, they can be used to solve tricky business problems. But in the wrong hands, they may be a square peg pounded into a round hole … or even worse.
I’m starting a new series called Sequels for SQL Server. In this series, I point you to sites where you can go beyond the nose-to-the-grindstone resources that we see every day as SQL Server professionals. These are the story that comes after and outside (the sequels) of our daily working lives (the other SQL). Let’s broaden our horizons together. If you hit on an interesting but overlooked topic, I’d like to hear from you.
Professional Development: Because there are two words in “database professional”.
Peter Drucker, one of the greats in management thought-leadership, would’ve turned 100 last week were he alive today. Check out these top 20 quotes from the man who revolutionized management theory.
Society: Important issues to discuss with your friends and family.
Quoting the Motley Fool, “We spent the latter half of 2008 feeling the wrath of “too big to fail.” Today, banks are bigger than ever. We need to end that. Now.” It’s Time to End “Too Big to Fail”. Read this thought-provoking article soon.
WorldView: If James Bond knows that the world is not enough, then so should I.
The smartest analyst on international issues out there, Fareed Zakari, discusses US and Indian relations in this insightful article from Newsweek.
I was happy to hear that the magazine Database Trends and Applications had recently relaunched their website. While I’d been a columnist there for a quite a while, I’d never been able to easily find my own articles nor check to see if they’d generated any interest. DBTA has changed all of that with their relaunch. I was also surprised, upon closer examination, that I’d been writing there for more than a year. Check to see if any of these articles are of interest to you. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
The November article just went live this week. The site traffic is 79% North America, with India and the UK as the next largets readership markets. It was heartening to see a relatively high level of interest in the “Code of Ethics for DBA’s” among other topics.
If you are perceiving a trend or overarching issue in the SQL Server world, I’d love to hear your input. Drop me a note here or use one of the methods available on http://KevinEKline.com/Contact/ to get in touch with me directly.
I’ve opined in the past about how strongly I think the health care industry in the USA needs a does of information technology. One profession making impressive strides in this area is America’s nurses.
On the one hand, we have NDNQI, the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators (NDNQI®). NDNQI is a repository for nursing-sensitive indicators collected at the nursing unit level. Since it began in the late 1990′s, the program has added many hospitals as well as additional data points (that is, the quality indicators). Lots of useful resources and good reading can be found here.
In addition to NDNQI, we have some excellent work being done by the Veteran’s Administration in their VANOD (VA Nursing Outcomes Database) project, which you can read about here. VANOD is also discussed in a nice presentation by the program manager here. You can download the PPT file directly here.
By tracking health care practices in aggregate and monitoring their outcomes, we can find direct correlation or, even better causation, for better health of patients when multiple practices can be used. For example, let’s say there are a few competing standard practices around the routine for taking the temperature of patients in a hospital – some take temperatures manually in the morning, some take temperatures manually in the evening, and a luck few who can afford the equipment take temperatures automatically through a sensor on the patient. If the data in aggregate is able to show that the automated method yields a measurable improvement in outcomes, then that approach can justified against the expense because we know patients are doing better. The American Nurses Association (ANA) reports on such progress here.
Additional technologies of interest are being reported, such as this article at www.SmarterTechnology.com and this article at www.InformationWeek.com. In fact, in indication of the importance health care information technology, InformationWeek has a really good portal dedicated just to that at http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/index.jhtml.
Congratulations to the ANA and to the VA for transforming data into actionable knowledge!
Here are a couple of nifty resources that you should bookmark.
Microsoft Answers
Join the conversation as a community leader through a new, fast-growing Microsoft site called Microsoft Answers. The site currently focuses on Microsoft’s consumer products starting with Windows Vista. Throughout the fall (actually, starting on September 28th), Microsoft began to add forums for Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows Live Services (in English, with other languages to follow starting back in October). Forums for Office will also be added later, with more consumer products to be added as the Microsoft Answers community grows.
Microsoft Answers is already live in the English language– go to http://answers.microsoft.com to view the existing forums. On September 28 (PST), Microsoft Answers will also offer community forums around Windows 7, Windows XP and Windows Live Services.
You’ll need to register, but if you are currently registered with MSDN and/or TechNet, your credentials and user profile will automatically be recognized by the Microsoft Answers site via your Windows Live ID). If you want to tweet about this, use the #MSAnswers hashtag.
WebSite Spark and Web Application Tool Kits
Microsoft has also announced WebsiteSpark featuring a number of Web Application Toolkits to the Web. Web Application Toolkits are designed to enable Web Developers to extend their web application capabilities simply and easily by providing them with a packaged set of running samples, templates and documentation – all in a consistent packaged format that is easy to download and run in a very short period of time.
One of the key criteria that I really like about the Web Application Toolkits is that they’re designed to enable Web Developers to get to an F5 (Run) experience very quickly and ensure that this is the right solution for their problem. I’ve always felt that coders are much more like artists than they are like engineers. And every good artists knows that they key to a great piece of art is the initial sketch. Unfortunately, our application development tools frequently constrain us from making a sketch in code, running it, and then refining it. After all, how many times have you heard about or been the developer who spent hours getting a sample to work, only to find it does not do the expected?
Microsoft WebsiteSpark includes 7 Web Application Toolkits (at the time of launch, maybe there are more now?), together with an introduction to the Web Application Toolkits on Channel9 by James Senior and Jonathan Carter. Me likey the Channel9. The example scenarios were selected based on feedback from community developers with the first 7 being detailed below:
You can find the complete list of Web Application Toolkits here. Microsoft plans for several more and are exploring additional ways to make it easier for Web Developers to find and reuse this content.
The Economist, my favorite news and analysis magazine, published an outstanding briefing and analysis on the coming wars of ascendancy between the major vendors of cloud computing technology and services. When a technological shift bubbles up into the mainstream news media, the technology has gone through a significant, society-altering right of passage. As technologists, we all know that the “outside world” doesn’t really get what we do. It doesn’t click for grandma that you’re doing difficult and important work because it’s hard to wrap your head around low-level technological work. And, unfortunately, most technologists can’t explain what they do on a daily basis without a lot of jargon and techie-speak. So when a major news magazine that speaks to a large number of CEOs and gray-haired types whose closest contact to email is having their admin send a message for them, it’s important to the world at large. Really important.
You can read the briefing here. (Be sure to read the comments. You’ll get some great insight into why cloud computing is a society-altering technology.)
You can read the full multi-page story, for subscribers only, here.
I’ve been rather publicly skeptical about the uptake of cloud computing (though not its significance), compared to some very optimistic prognostications, such as that by my friend and fellow MVP Paul Nielsen. (For a good generalized discussion about SQL Server in the cloud, take a look at Brent Ozar’s posts here.) The important thing I think that is being widely overlooked by we in the trenches is that the biggest issues around who will dominate cloud computing and how those specifications will bubble to the top. We all know and love and work with SQL on a daily basis, yet we forget that databases went through a decades long period in which SQL had no standard. Similarly, I think many of us are beginning to map our minds around cloud computing in the “this is the ways things are” sort of mind frame, instead of the “this is the new Wild West where anything goes” sort of mind frame. The closest analogy that comes to mind is that of the serial bus on my venerable Intel 286 PC. Any time I wanted to connect a product from a new vendor to that serial bus, I had a lot of work ahead. The USB adapter made everyone’s life better, but it was painful getting there.
Something similar is now being played out in the cloud between Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. We can begin to study what sort of applications to deploy in the cloud and how to support them, but if we choose the wrong “serial adapter” we’ll have even more work to do in the future. One or more of these vendors (and their preferred standards and specifications) will rise to the top. But until a leader emerges, you can be that I’ll be hedging my bets by building and deploying applications on internal infrastructures and database platforms.
Quest Software Pain of the Week Webcast: The 5-Minute SQL Server Healthcheck
Join me and Christian Bolton, UK SQL Server MVP and blogger,as we discuss how to quickly evaluate the basic health of your SQL Server environment. You’ll learn about several quick checks you can perform in minutes to determine if critical thresholds are being met—and where you need to resolve issues.
Date: Thursday, November 12, 2009
Time: 8 a.m. Pacific / 11 a.m. Eastern / 4 p.m. United Kingdom / 5 p.m. Central Europe
Duration: 45-60 minutes
Cost: FREE
Presenters: Christian Bolton, SQL Server MVP & Kevin Kline, SQL Server Expert, Quest Software
One lucky attendee will win SQL Server expert Kevin Kline’s new essential reference book, SQL in a Nutshell. The drawing will be held at the end of the webcast, and the winner will be notified by e-mail.
