Editorials

SQL Server Version Insights

Special SelectViews Edition
Today’s show is a special – Getting Started with Reporting Services. We’ll be presenting information on how you get it going, how to get your first reports up and going and much more.

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Featured Article(s)
How I hire a DBA (when it comes to the interview)
As I sit down and answer questions that I get from the How to hire a DBA article, I have recieved many questions on the interviews. In this article series I hope to answer a lot of those questions.

Do You REALLY Know What Your Jobs Are Doing?

At Tech Ed, Microsoft demonstrated a series of SQL Agent Jobs their Database Operations team uses for maintenance, performance tuning, and disaster recovery. When you add this to the other jobs on your systems already working to keep things going, things can get hairy. Here’s the thing – you might not even realize that things are not running like they should. Why? Because visibility across your entire set of jobs and servers isn’t something SQL Server provides well natively. Get the real information about your job system and find out about chaining jobs, reporting on run-times, seeing visual drag and drop schedules and more at the SQL Sentry site. You can get a trial version of their comprehensive job management tools there as well. Get more information here.

Day 30 as DBA
This follow-on to the Day 1 as DBA show will go into the things you can do now that you’re semi-established in your routines. Daily maintenance, auditing, security checks, best practices and more. There is a lot to consider and think about when you’re putting a good foundation in place for your systems, we’ll cover check point items here and keep you up to speed on what’s next.

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> Live date: 8/14/2007

Some Version Insights From "Within"
Received a great note from a Microsoft insider with some perspective on the version approach and goals with the more frequent releases. As I said before, we’re sort of "give me more, give me less" in how we’ve asked collectively for more releases, more frequently, but then when they come more frequently, things get dicey. I think there is a lot of work to do in the industry in general about better and faster certification on a given version, while at the same time providing the better flow of software updates.

From John Smith (heh, I’ve always wanted to say "the name has been changed to protect the source."): "I think the main point with versions is that it’s very hard to be responsive to customer requirements on a five year ship cycle. If you have to wait five years for a feature you need, you will likely come up with an alternative plan and not need it anymore five years down the road. The advantage of a tow or three year cycle is that you can provide features in a timely manner. The other advantage is that if you get a release every two or three years, it’s practical to skip one if it doesn’t have enough features you really need. On a five year cycle, if you skip a release you’re 10 years out of date when the next one comes along and for most people that’s much too long. This is of course more risky for Microsoft because if we come out with a release that isn’t very compelling, everyone will skip it so it puts more pressure on the SQL Server team to make sure there’s a lot of value in each release – which isn’t really a bad thing for users is it?"

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