Other Technologies
Discussion about other technologies I find cool or interesting
The past couple of years has seen a great increase in the interest of server consolidation and virtualization. Once considered an almost impossible to achieve ideal, today more and more companies are taking a serious look at its benefits. And those benefits are quite alluring.
I have talked with colleagues who swear by virtualization. They claim that when properly configured, SQL Server can perform every bit as well on a virtual server as when on a dedicated box. So for them, the benefits greatly outweigh any potential drawbacks.
Although I don't have a great deal of experience with server virtualization, I...
At the 2007 PASS Community Summit in Denver, a keynote speaker made a passing comment about how there has not been a security bulletin released for SQL Server in over three years! I forget which speaker made the statement, but I found it utterly amazing. Not a single security bulletin released in over three years! Could this be true?
If you've worked with SQL Server for a while, you'll undoubtedly remember SQL Slammer, the worm that hit thousands of SQL Servers around the world in 2003. It's effects were nothing short of devastating for many companies.
I made a mental...
I just completed teaching a Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services class in Charlotte, North Carolina - a wonderful and beautiful place to visit!
In a couple of the demonstrations, we used some predefined formatting strings to customize the way a user can see a value in a report. For example, we used C0 to display a currency value with no numbers to the right of a decimal point.
One question that almost always comes up during the class is: where can I find a list of those predefined formatting strings?
Microsoft has them on the MSDN Library site, but the...
One of the things I really like about teaching technical classes is getting to know and talk with students, learning of the challenges they face and how they've addressed them. Frequently, I can learn from their experiences, too. So, it works out well for both student and instructor.
In a custom Visual Studio/SQL Server class last week, I made a passing comment about Visual Studio being a very good text editor, but that it lacked one feature that I really like in other editors - block copy and paste. I lamented that the Visual Studio editor doesn't allow you to select a rectangular...