But what to get? The geek in me had to search around and examine different models. I'd bought an Acer for my son, and it seemed like a nice machine. I found some nice ones with long battery life on Amazon and was tempted to get one. However I've owned a couple Dells, and always been happy with them. My friend, Andy Warren, says to stick with what works, so Dell was under consideration.

Apparently not. There's a back door in that you can start SQL Server in single user mode, and if you are an administrator, you can connect and you'll be a sysadmin. You can then fix your mistake and go happily on your way. That's pretty cool, and it's a good thing, right?

The data from this whitepaper has been around for quite a few months, but as I talk with people and mention it at times, I often see surprised looks. It seems that there are many DBAs that don't understand it, or don't think it might apply to them.

If we require encryption for credit cards, medical records, and the like, shouldn't we also be thinking about encryption for the military? I would like to think that this issue should be fixed soon, even at the expense of replacing some other hardware, but I'd also like to see some responsibility taken by the people that arrogantly allowed this system to be developed and implemented.

I'm not certain that I like that idea, especially as storage systems become larger and more complex. I could argue that the network administrators might be the closest skillset to managing and handling large storage systems, but I'm not sure. If an IT department is indeed a series of armed camps, it's not a skills challenge we have, it's a cultural issue among different groups. Delivering a service or a set of applications to a user requires different talents and skills working together, not removing people from the loop. It requires a forging of new relationships, not the elimination of old ones.

On the other hand, I think we often end up with a group of people that lack depth, miss out on some of the fundamentals, and don't appreciate where they are because they haven't paid their dues. Too often I see people thrown into jobs that they have to teach themselves about as they go along, or they have success in one area, like desktop administration, and find themselves running another system, like a database or mail system.

Over the years I've had mixed feelings about the Summits. As a DBA I wanted it in Seattle so that I could meet and ask questions of dozens of MS developers during the Summit. As the editor here, it's still good to meet MS people, but I'm less concerned about finding the mid-level developer that worked on PBM to ask about an issue than I am about getting together with Dan Jones and talking higher level issues, and sharing beverage.

Read the rest of Moving PASS at SQLServerCentral.

Now SQL Server might be expensive, or might be cheap, depending (I love that word) on your point of view. Oracle lists for $47.5k for the Enterprise Edition of it's v11 database server (per CPU). DB2 runs about $20k/core I think. Hard to tell with them. MySQL, with support is about $5k/server/yr, and SQL Server Enterprise is $25,000/CPU. Now there are all sorts of variation for clients, sockets, add-ons, etc. that make comparisons difficult, but if you assume you are licensing 2 cores/sockets for your application, that's a pretty hefty sum.

There are always horror stories about laptops, from every manufacturer, and it doesn't matter if you have a cheap Acer, or a high end Apple, all manufacturers will have issues. When you make thousands of anything, there's bound to be a few lemons. That's OK, and I get that. I think I've just had a failure, and I understand that can happen.

Why is that?

I mean I understand why the backup structure changes, and why the database structure changes to take advantage of the new changes in the next version of SQL Server. You want your new version server to run more efficiently, and often there are core engine changes that ensure that happens, regardless of the compatibility level of the database. That is, almost all the time, a good thing.

If you read the goals of Andy Warren, Tim Mitchell, and others, you'll see that most of them talk about growing their professional reputations and brands quite a bit. They all talk about speaking at events or doing some other growth activity that puts them out in front of other professionals. That's great, and it's those attitudes that ensure that the rest of us get great opportunities to learn at a SQL Saturday or the PASS Summit.

Not that most of us want to write that low level code, but I'm sure it's of interest to a few people. I know I found myself checking the list to see how many I'd read and which ones I might want to tackle at some point. Being in technology, I think we're naturally curious, even to the point where we'd like the chance to write an Operating System (or maybe just the idea of trying that).

Read the rest of Do You Want to Learn a Thing or Two? at SQLServerCentral.

As the site as evolved, we have also limited advertising on the site. We have never really allowed advertising or promotions in the forums since vendors often seem to annoy users with their posts. They seem to feel that if they post once and get a good response that posting 100 times should get them a great response. It doesn't, and my inbox tends to fill with complaints. So I remove advertising posts.

I typically do something with regards to New Year's resolutions, and this year is no different. However I'm looking to get you to focus a bit more this year on something that I think is valuable for everyone: professional development. No matter where you are in your career, working on improving some aspect of your work will help you to continue to move forward. For this Friday's poll, I'm asking this question:

My first prediction was that SQLServerCentral would pass 1,000,000 members. We did, and that was a pretty easy one. We had a minor celebration, and continued growing throughout the year, though at a slower pace. We still get a lot of traffic, but we've removed the need to register to read most of the content, and so that has slowed down our growth. I think we're still doing well, and I thank everyone for all the support that keeps me employed.

He also had posted a query on Superuser about recovering his data. It's back up now, but it was a hard lesson for him to learn, and a little embarrassing for someone that's running a programming site teaching people how to better build systems.

At the same time I see many technical people frustrated at times by the lack of resources being devoted to issues. This might be people or hardware that could help make something run smoother, save time, save the company money, etc. I actually saw a post recently with someone venting about the expenditures on the Christmas party by their company when they were regularly spending time deleting files because of a shortage of disk space on a server.

There was an interesting interview from by Phil Schiller of Apple talking about their approval process for their App store. For those of you unfamiliar with this, Apple has a store that allows sales to iPhone and iTouch users of various applications. However all of the programs listed on the App store must be approved by Apple, and with Apple controlling the hardware, they have the final say on what's available.

If Microsoft is serious about helping clients secure data, this is one feature that should be deployed across all editions. I could even argue that it's more important to have this on Express than Enterprise. After all many of the data loss issues reported in recent years have come because of missing laptops, which often contain data from databases.

I realize that many people don't usually use Express to work with data, preferring another tool like Excel, but we could look to rectify that. We could store the data in an Express edition instance and set up queries against the local database from Excel. And in the places where Express is being used, this would instantly make the data on laptops more secure.

If you read some of the descriptions in the article, you realize that the term "database" is being taken loosely by the author. The number one listing, the World Data Centre for Climate, has 6PB of data in "magnetic tapes" for "easy access." While I'm sure they have a lot of data, I'm not sure that those tapes qualify as part of a database.

I know that the really good consultants and architects out there, the successful ones that constantly find work, often bring guidelines with them at a new job or engagements. The decision they make, which might not seem to be related from project to project, are often actually related by a set of rules which help to create that regular success.

I've worked in a lot of American companies in my career and it's been rare that I find a group of people that provide strong leadership, or sometimes even any leadership at all. I heard recently from one person that their entire management committee had resigned without a word to the employees. That's typical of what I'd expect, with management not having respect for the staff that does most of the work for a company. There's often a fundamental lack of respect from those in charge, somehow viewing everyone below them in the organizational chart as less important than those at their level or above them.

They asked customers what would be a good interface for working with sets of data. The customers wanted something that looked like a spreadsheet. They asked about how customers wanted to manipulate data and heard that something was needed like the formulas in Excel, which were easy to use. They asked about how data should be shared and presented, and customers said that ease of building reports and charts in Excel would be preferred.

The perception of all of our systems and the services we deliver is what really counts. I heard someone recently paraphrase a well known saying. I don't remember it exactly, but it was something like "People never remember the quality code we deliver, but they never forget the lack of quality in our code."

Whether you think you'd like this in your life or not, it's an interesting knowledge idea for companies or individuals. Maybe it’s a good idea for programmers or DBAs. What if you could have all the code you'd ever written? What about tests of that code and the applications where it had been used? Would a walkthrough of tuning efforts you'd made for some types of SQL or even queries that solved particular challenges be useful? What about a walkthrough of the changes to your schema across time?

It seems that sometimes we are confronted with too many choices, and it ends up confusing us. We freeze up, often unable to make a decision.  You could view this as a complicated piece of software like Word or Excel. Or maybe the shutdown menu from Windows, which is way too complicated for Joel Spolsky.

It's funny how much people seem incorporate their work into the rest of their lives somehow. I've seen all sorts of web sites, blogs, license plates, even Twitter handles that use some part of your work as the name. So for this Friday, I thought I'd put a fun poll out there.

When I started in my career, there were relatively few ways to network with others, and they all required a lot of time. You had to spend time out of work going to happy hour, some professional event, or playing golf. You spent time with people, but you could touch relatively few people for your effort. While you can build strong relationships this way, they can be hard to maintain.

Recently I saw a report that T-Mobile employees had sold customer data to brokers, who in turn sold it to rivals. Now the details weren't released as to how this occurred, but there are plenty of issues that I have seen in many companies that would make this easy. You can't always prevent a user that needs legitimate access to data from mis-using it, but you can take some steps to prevent it from being easy or undetectable. Things like auditing, obfuscating data in test or development environments, and using encryption when data is at rest.

Recently I saw a report that T-Mobile employees had sold customer data to brokers, who in turn sold it to rivals. Now the details weren't released as to how this occurred, but there are plenty of issues that I have seen in many companies that would make this easy. You can't always prevent a user that needs legitimate access to data from mis-using it, but you can take some steps to prevent it from being easy or undetectable. Things like auditing, obfuscating data in test or development environments, and using encryption when data is at rest.

Recently I found a post where someone had a problem with their transaction log. They had installed snapshot replication, but the log would not shrink despite repeated log backups. Eventually through some advice of others, they discovered that someone else had set up transactional replication on that instance and they were not aware of it.

I noticed a post from an ISV awhile back asking if there was a way to remove Windows authentication. Most of us know that we can't remove it, and it concerned me a bit that an ISV didn't know this. The poster wanted to know if we could make the database more secure, potentially limiting the ability of a client to muck around with the database.

That was my big argument for going to a conference when I was employed as a DBA. I'd tell my boss that a conference is a chance for me to learn something new from all the amazing speakers that attend. Many of the well known MVPs, like Kimberly Tripp, Brian Knight, and Andrew Kelley, teach me something every time I hear them speak. Many of the other speakers that do interesting work, like Michelle Ufford of Go Daddy, help me learn how to better build my environment based on the experiences they present from their jobs.

That got me thinking about something that would be handy for examining hardware. What if a tool could take the workload of a server, looking at the volume of queries, and then determining the rate, ratio, and types of I/Os that the application performs. Rather than look at the queries, look at the work that the queries do.

But is that viewpoint valid? Are there things that you can't do in VB.NET that you can do in C#? Especially with all the OOP changes in VB.NET that have occurred in the last few years. So for a Friday poll, for the developers and hybrid DBAs out here:

Virtualization is really a one-time cost savings. Once you've virtualized a server, you can't do I again, so there are no repeat savings from this event. Is consolidation the same? After all, the main driving force for that process is also cost, and once you've consolidated a server you can't do it again.

I had to explain that the CUs are cumulative by definition, and you only need to apply the last one, along with any service packs (SP) on which they are based. You do know that CUs are based on SPs, don't you?

When I read this quote recently, I was surprised: "If the next programmer you interview can't identify at least one of the programmers interviewed in Coders at Work and tell you roughly what they're famous for … I'd say that's an immediate no-hire. "

I think most of you that are at the Summit in Seattle this week have felt the same way, but I wanted to get your opinions. This has been a tough econonmic year for many companies, and it's a large expense to send someone to the Summit for a week. It's Friday, and for this week's poll:

Why is that so? Why can't the "restore" script be stored as part of the backup file and let the user open it, and get notified if there are issues. Or walked through the process? If you open a diff, can't it include the "name" of the last full? Or search for that file in the folder? What about logs, can't SSMS just "figure out" what LSNs are in which files and load them up automatically? Shouldn't a log have the name of the last full backup in it? Or the name of the last and next log backup files?

There is a blog at ZDNet that talked about how Sharepoint is six products for Office bundled together, it has thousands of people working on it's development, and no one is quite sure where it fits in. Is it a content management system? Is it an enterprise social networking platform? I've never been quite sure what the big deal is.

Read the rest of Low Hanging Fruit at SQLServerCentral

I thought this might make a good Friday poll, so I'll ask you this week:

This election was a change from previous years in that the voting was done before the annual Summit. Typically I've scrambled to find some time during the Summit to vote, and haven't always remembered to do so. This year the candidates were a little more accessible electronically, with bios posted on the PASS site, and a great series of Interviews from Brent Ozar (Thomas LaRock, Brian Moran, Matt Morollo, and Jeremiah Peschka). The one with Matt Morollo was particularly engaging with lots of comments and debate in the discussion. It was a little controversial, and I think with good reason. It's worth a read, and it got me thinking about what we want from PASS, and what we want our board members to accomplish.

Why was it worth it? That's an easy one, and it's the same reason I went to the Business of Software conference last year, and why I'd recommend it for other people. It's why I go to the MVP Summit, and why I usually try to attend keynote speeches.

As the world changes, it seems that so many old paradigms and methods of doing business either evolve or die off. I think this is just the way the world changes, but I think that the last decade, and possibly the next one, will change the world quite dramatically.

Most of the time I get the sense that a particular person is just unaware of how to solve a small problem and some hints, sample code, or suggestions on what to try will help them solve a problem. However there are times that it seems that someone is way out of their league. I don't want to specifically cite a thread, but I have seen a few posts that were asking for help with a large problem, such as how to set up a high availability solution for their servers.

I thought about it over the years, wondering what it would be like to work at Microsoft. I'd known a lot of employees over the years, thought they were interesting people, and it seemed like an exciting place to work. There was a time I even wondered if I could take over Robert Scoble's job and be the "voice" of Microsoft.

For those of you hiring people, do you want to hire people like this? I'd like to think that you do and you look for people that present themselves as self-motivated. A person's history, the types of problems they've solved, the way others talk about them, show the way that they handle themselves at work.

For this Friday, I wanted to take the temperature of the readers out there with regard to their career. The poll I have in mind is:

I tried to read through the quickstart on Apache's site for the common core installation and walk through a few examples, but it's a little hard to tell what exactly the buzz is about. Wikipedia was more help, pointing me to the MapReduce papers that Google published. I'll see if I can work through them at some point. Hadoop is available under a free license and the list of companies using it for large data set processing is impressive: Yahoo!, Amazon, Facebook, and more.

That seems to be a story played out in many companies all around the world. Lots of creative, talented people, all stuck in boring jobs cranking out code that supports the business. Over time they become jaded, un-motivated, or burned out at their jobs, perhaps even questioning their choice of career.

I've mostly abandoned the goal of becoming a CIO, but I still read about the position, trying to better understand the management point of view for many issues. Recently I ran across an article on how CIOs can better support their CEOs and thought it had some good advice, and not just advice for current CIOs.

Read the rest of Support the Boss at SQLServerCentral.

When I came across this blog talking about information workers and how they use technology, I was pleasantly surprised. It seems that Gen X people are more likely to participate in the Web 2.0 technologies out there. That seems to match my experience where I find many younger, Gen Y-type people having very short attention spans and not being willing to give back as much to the world. They don't post as often, and tend to just want to consume things quickly and without effort. At least that's been my general experience. There are always people that don't fit the mold, but I see a lot of those trends in people that are younger than 30 years old.

As SQL Server professionals should we care? I think we ought to be aware of these issues because you never know when some of this software might be in use on a server. What if you have old versions of Quicktime or Adobe PDFs that you generate in one of your servers. An attack on that software could be aimed to move against the database supplying the information.

We have a very talented group of professionals that donate their time to help others, something that I do as well.

Having been in a number of technology departments, from small to large, I can say that I see both sides. On one hand technology departments spend a lot of time and money cleaning up mistakes and problems from users. On the other hand, new applications and enhancements can often increase the efficiency or effectiveness of workers that find a new way to do their jobs.

In most of my past jobs, I've implemented security like this:

But did you clean house? In other words, while getting ready for this upgrade, planning ,testing, and preparing, did you re-examine your system to see if there were objects, users, jobs, or something else in your database server that is old, obsolete, and ready for retirement? Did you look for things to delete while you were getting ready to make everything else better?

Since I'll be there for 3 days, I don't have a party to plan or run (this year), I decided to check out the list of sessions at the event. I've been watching the banners rotate by, and seeing a fantastic list of speakers. Most of them have a lot to teach me and you, so I'll give you my top list of sessions and why. Note that I'm not going by the schedule for now. I'll figure out what to do with conflicts later.

What's your education worth?

There was a time when I eagerly looked forward to the new 486 processors, the Pentiums, and the rising transistor counts along with the ever-increasing clock speeds. There was a race to build faster processors, which would make all my applications run quicker. That's something I like, since I hate waiting for splash screens to load applications and windows to render.

Is that a big deal? After all a few people pointed out administrators could reset passwords. However that's not the same thing. It's one thing for an administrator to make a change on SQL Server, but quite another thing for them to do it "as" another person and make it appear that other person made the change. That could be a major issue. What if a DBA impersonated the CFO to approve a purchase order?

But what's the best? The most efficient? The highest performing by some measure? The most stable? As with almost any SQL Server question, or even any question in other areas, the answer is "it depends."

It seems to me that it's harder, but I'm really not sure. I think you need a separate backup process, and a more complex recovery process, but perhaps that's not true. Maybe I'm just over-thinking it.  Since it's Friday, I decided this would make a good poll.

However I'm not sure how many executives will be able to do that themselves, or with a small number of non-technical people. More and more we find systems feeding data to each other in an automated fashion, so it might not be as simple as entering some incorrect values in a few places. So they might come to the DBA for help. And if someone comes to you, asking for changes to data, or worse, auditing systems, what do you do? If someone offers you money, or threatens your job, how do you handle it?

Someone then commented that you shouldn't have installed all that for an evaluation edition.

Read the rest of You Shouldn't Have Done That at SQLServerCentral.

The article talks about only needing your birthday, your zip code, and gender to positively identify the vast majority of people in the US. That's not much information, and it definitely means I'm definitely not giving out my birthday anymore to the vast majority of people that ask for it. I'll likely not even use my current zip code anymore since most of the places that ask about it are probably fine with knowing the general area and don't need the specific code.

These are symbolic events, and while I'd urge you to go see them if you can, they aren't really in place to provide security. In our lives and work, we have real security measures that are designed to protect things that we are really concerned about. In the technology business, one thing we do is change passwords.

We don't have a lot of apprenticeship type programs in the IT world. Too often we have people learning on their own (and doing a good job), without a lot of guidance from older workers. I think some of that is the rapidly changing field of technology has many people struggling to keep up, others jumping in to be the first with some new platform, and many older people sticking with what they know.

As SQL Server has grown wider and wider, incorporating more and more features, it almost seems to have all the features that might qualify it as its own operating system, but it still has dependencies on Windows, and exists as a service under Windows. That is both good and bad, since you can easily use your physical server for other applications, but those applications can take resources away from SQL Server and cause contention.

I ran across a blog post overselling yourself that had some interesting points. Points that I think more people should pay attention to as we become more connected, more "social", and more likely to be asked about something we've done in an interview. These days if you have written a blog, posted in a forum, or made a note on a social network it is likely that the next person you interview will read it. If you post a lot of information they won't read everything, but I would assume they'll read something you've written.

I think back in my career to jobs I've had, and I wonder how many times I've made changes to a system, fundamental changes like disabling or enabling auditing of something, changing a service account, adding or removing sysadmins or something else. All of these changes arguably could affect the stability of the instance. And in many cases I did them quickly because of some need I thought I have.

In researching Home Server, I saw a blog post about how RAID was a bad idea for a home network. It's complicated to manage and requires drives to be the same size, which can be a problem for someone at home. Since we rarely buy drives, and then we tend to buy them one at a time, matching sizes and speeds can be an issue.

However there are some new types of databases being implemented in the world. Amazon's SimpleDB is mentioned in the article along with a few others that seem to be built to supplement a traditional RDBMS and provide some nice advantages in a distributed environment. For example, SimpleDB seems to be good for lookup data for remote systems, which could be web sites, mobile phones, or some other far flung technology that doesn't need to meet the ACID requirements necessary for transactional systems. Terracotta allows offloading of some transactional elements, preventing the need for so many round trips to the database.

Read the rest of New Databases at SQLServerCentral.com

It's an interesting question and one I've been thinking about a lot since reading Andy Warren's posts on the subject. He thought it was interesting enough to engage Don Gabor for his business and spend a little money to learn how to do it better. After having a few sessions, Andy thought it was helpful enough to get a pre-conference session at PASS on this topic. It's a short pre-con, 2 hours, and won't interfere with anything else you've booked. It's an additional $60, but I've paid my fee (it's a business expense) and will be there.

Some time ago I had the debate with someone about what the default fillfactor should be. It is 0 in 2008 (pages filled), but I'm not sure that's the best choice. Many people don't track page splits, or even know the ratio of reads to writes. Perhaps most applications are so heavily read weighted that this makes sense, but my feeling is that something more like 85 or 90 would be better.

However that changes this November when SQL Connections is being held on Nov 9-12 in Las Vegas. I've always supported the PASS Summit, and wondered how SQL Connections was run, but never attended. This year SQLServerCentral negotiated its own track at the show, with us supplying the speakers.

Recently Apple announced that they were looking to re-invent the album with the release of liner notes and booklets along with music. It looks like a way to give more value to consumers, and perhaps convince them to buy whole albums instead of particular songs. I think it’s interesting, and I am one of the few that misses browsing through albums and seeing the cover art that used to go with them. CD liners notes aren’t the same, and digital downloads seem far removed. For those of you that don’t remember what an album is, I’ve included a photo ;)

The long hours many people work can create lots of stress and impact the rest of your life. For every hour you work, that's one less hour for your family, your hobbies, or just time to decompress and relax, as my friend Tjay does.

So many business studies over the years have shown that it costs much, much more than acquire a new customer than retain an old one. And while you can only convince a person to spend so much money with you, that repeat, steady spending is the backbone of so many businesses. It would seem to me that not offering a discount for loyalty is a mistake in your business.

However these programs are implemented in many different ways, with different data requirements. Some use it to recommend other products, some might offer you discounts or coupons, some a free gift of some sort over time. All of these are good uses of the customer relationship, but I don’t think many of them are well thought out.