The Complete Weekly Roundup of SQL Server News

Hand-picked content to sharpen your professional edge

Recent developments such as the Apple vs. Samsung trials, or Oracle's unsuccessful claim that it was owed $1bn (£640m) in compensation for Google's use of its technologies in the Android system have made many people wonder if these actions are damaging the industry. Patents have now become some of the most important assets held by technology companies. Google recently paid $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility, mainly for its 17,000 patents. Earlier in the year, Microsoft bought 925 patents from AOL for $1.1 billion, later getting $550 million by selling on a portion of them  to Facebook. The patent arms race and the court battles surrounding patent infringements has reached a stage where the UN has seen fit to intervene, with major players like Microsoft, Apple and Google dragged together to decide whether the impact of patent disputes on innovation is just too high.

The titans of the tech industry might sometimes seem like they’re at each other’s throats, but it’s nothing compared to the foundations of the electrical age, with Thomas Edison electrocuting an elephant on a metal plate in a bid to discredit rival Nicola Tesla’s Alternating Current. The birth of Hollywood as the home of the film industry came about when industrious, if unscrupulous, moviemakers decided that they didn’t want to pay licensing the Edison Company enforced on their filmmaking patents, so they went as far as they could from Edison’s New York base in the hope that no one would collect fees. Of course, their views are very different now.

The Wright brothers, initially revered for their work on powered flight, fell out of favour with the public when their strictly-enforced patents were seen to be retarding the growth of the nascent aviation industry, and even damaging America’s efforts in World War 1.

Technology patents have been around since 500 BC, and have been in common use since the fifteenth century, but it seems that they still haven’t hit a balance between providing protection to innovators without stifling future innovation. Often, they remain in the hands of people who have been beaten at market by similar products, and used against those who succeeded. And at a time when it’s possible to essentially patent a square with rounded corners, it doesn’t look like the system will get better any time soon. As is often the way, The Onion has the most insightful take on the issue.

What feuds have you found particularly interesting, and which do you think have irrefutably damaged the companies involved?

» Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums

All the headlines and interesting SQL Server information that we've collected over the past week, and sometimes even a few repeats if we think they fit. These headlines are gathered throughout the week and are posted in real time at the website. Check there for information throughout the week or enjoy this weekly summary of the SQL Server world.

Tech News : General Interest

Quantum computing pioneers from U.S., France win 2012 Nobel Prize - An American and a Frenchman have won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physics for their work on quantum optics, which could one day lead to faster computer processors, better telecommunications or more accurate timepieces....(more)

Trolls filed 40% of patent infringement lawsuits in 2011 - Trolls have long been the standard villain in patent debates. Often little more than an empty office in East Texas, patent trolls produce no useful products themselves but earn millions of dollars by threatening patent lawsuits against productive companies. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that patent trolls are a serious and growing problem, but until recently there has been little hard data to back up the evidence....(more)

Top Rackspace lawyer: "We'd love to get rid of software patents" - "Once you reach a certain size, you become more of a target," Alan Schoenbaum told us in a recent interview. Schoenbaum is the general counsel of Rackspace, which achieved $1 billion in revenue for the first time last year. He said that patent litigation against the San Antonio company has "accelerated over the last two years."...(more)

Tech News : The Lighter Side

Bravo Debuts Trailer for New Silicon Valley Show - For whatever reason, reality TV is a hugely popular genre. There's always room for one more show, and Bravo's latest project sees the network's cameras trained on Silicon Valley....(more)

French phone bill waived after 12 quadrillion-euro blunder - A woman in south-west France, who received a telephone bill of nearly 12 quadrillion euros, has had the real amount she owed waived - after the company admitted its mistake....(more)

Usage guidance for a popcorn machine in the kitchenette - What are the top three reasons the fire department are called to the Microsoft campus?...(more)

“Can you fix my Windows 95 computer?”: How to troll a tech support scammer - Pity the poor employees of companies like “Windows Technical Support"—scammers who make money by "fixing" computers that were never broken in the first place....(more)

SQL Server News : Events

Guess What’s Back? Tweet for a Ticket to PASS Summit 2012 - For SQL Server professionals and enthusiasts alike, the place to be next month is PASS Summit 2012. Now here's your chance to attend this SQL Server community event of the year with a free full 3-day registration to this amazing conference, and all you have to do is Tweet for a Ticket to Pass Summit 2012!...(more)

Microsoft News : General Interest

Feature Updates to the Windows Azure Portal - Lots of activity over at the Windows Azure portal this weekend, including some exciting new features and major improvements to existing features....(more)

Microsoft delivers beta of Azure services for Windows Server - Microsoft is moving ahead with plans to add some of its new Windows Azure services to Windows Server 2012, announcing the beta release of those services on October 8....(more)

Hardware News

IBM Offers PureData To Help Enterprises Tame Big Data - IBM has expanded its PureSystems family of expert integrated systems with the introduction of PureData System. These systems compete with Oracle’s Exadata and SAP’s HANA in the high performance computing (HPC) appliance market....(more)

Dell supercomputer effort spawns new line of servers - Dell has developed a line of servers based on designs the company is using in an upcoming 10-petaflop supercomputer called Stampede, which will be fully deployed at the University of Texas, Austin, starting next year....(more)

Blogs : Analysis Services / BI

Best Practices in Data Visualization - In this new world of exploding data volumes, the ability to make sense of all this data and effectively communicate insights from it is a highly valued skillset. Communicating trustworthy insights includes choosing the appropriate data visualizations to tell a story or make a key point. That may seem trivial at first, but in fact, it is quite powerful....(more)

Introduction to MDX for PowerPivot Users, Part 1 - The more I use PowerPivot, the more I realise how many more cool things you can do when building your Excel reports if you know a bit of MDX. Of course it seems a bit strange to say this, because MDX is a bit passé and DAX is the native language of PowerPivot, SSAS Tabular and, well the future....(more)

Blogs : Career

IT workers staying put, CIOs staying longer - CIOs are being predictably cautious with IT budgets for next year, and are focusing on increasing use of cloud technologies and offshore outsourcing, according to the annual report of technology trends by the Society for Information Management....(more)

How I Work: Staying Productive Whilst Traveling - Buck Woody travels a lot, but still needs to get wok done. Here he shares his tips for staying productive while on the move....(more)

Blogs : Database Design, Theory and Development

Use What Works: Prefixing Database Tables with 'TBL' - “If you can’t tell a table from a view you need to try harder”. That quote is from Karen López, and she often makes the comment in reference to my advocating the use of prefixes in object names. My reason for wanting to use prefixes is simple enough: I want to know if I am looking at a table or a view when reviewing code....(more)

Blogs : Developer Tools

How do you convince the business that Source Control for databases is a good idea? - Source control has been in use by application developers for many years, and it has major benefits for database developers too. Read on to find out how you can win software to help you integrate Source Control into your development environment....(more)

Blogs : Events

24 Hours of PASS Recordings Online - The 24 Hours of PASS sessions are in and available for streaming. If you missed an hour or ten of the learning goodness, now’s your chance to go back and see what you missed....(more)

The Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow is coming to a city near you - reserve your seat! - The second and more in-depth leg of the Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow is about to begin. There are already more than 36 MVPs from 17 countries lined up and on point to deliver in depth real world training on Windows Server 2012....(more)

Summit Old, Summit New, Summit Borrowed... - PASS Summit is coming up. Rob Farley posts his thoughts on the value of the Summit....(more)

Blogs : Hardware

Innovation - Computers are so cool. I remember thinking that as a kid, thinking about how I could tell a computer to do something for me with a little programming. Some of my programs weren't that impressive, such as the ones that helped me perform chemistry lab calculations, but they were helpful. I remember having so many ideas about what I could make a computer do that I couldn't even find time to work on a fraction of them....(more)

Blogs : NOSQL

MongoDB or How I learned to stop worrying and love SQL - At ThoughtLeadr, they've been using MongoDB for a year and a half. During that time they've moved from elation to depression using this trendy NoSQL datastore....(more)

Blogs : Performance and Tuning

FAQ around sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats - For those of you who may not be familiarized with this object, sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats is one of the many Dynamic Management Views built into SQL Server. It reveals enlightening facts about how useful your indexes are or how much of an overhead they are to the performance of the system....(more)

The Top Three Performance Tuning Mistakes - Performance tuning ain’t easy. To do it well you need to use all of your technical skill, plan strategically, and communicate your recommendations effectively. You also need to inspire adoption. After all, what good is a plan to change a system if you can’t convince anyone to go along with you?...(more)

Blogs : Security and Auditing

Dodging 5 Dangerous Database Default Settings - Even as enterprises spend buckets of cash on data defenses at various layers of IT infrastructure, many of them sabotage their efforts by ultimately storing that information in poorly configured databases....(more)

AT&T, IBM Jointly Offer Secure Cloud for Businesses - Andy Geisse, CEO of AT&T Business Solutions, said in a statement that the companies "are delivering a new, network-enabled cloud service that marries the security and speed of AT&T's global network with the control and management capabilities of IBM's enterprise cloud." The joint cloud offering by AT&T and IBM will launch early next year....(more)

The Insecurity of Networks - Not computer networks, networks in general: Findings so far suggest that networks of networks pose risks of catastrophic danger that can exceed the risks in isolated systems. ...(more)

Blogs : SQL Server 2012

Sequence Objects in SQL 2012 and SQL 2008 - Sequence Objects are new starting in SQL Server 2012. They work similarly to an IDENTITY value, but where the IDENTITY value is scoped to a specific column in a specific table, the Sequence Object is scoped to the entire database and controlled by application code....(more)

Articles : Administration

Tune Your Indexing Strategy with SQL Server DMVs - SQL Server Indexes need to be effective. It is wrong to have too few or too many. The ones you create must ensure that the workload reads the data quickly with a minimum of I/O. As well as a sound knowledge of the way that relational databases work, it helps to be familiar with the Dynamic Management Objects that are there to assist with your indexing strategy....(more)

Articles : Development

W3C’s Web Platform Docs – Your "Go To" for All Things Web Development - From Microsoft: We are thrilled to share the news that the W3C announced the alpha release of Web Platform Docs. Adobe, Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia and Opera are among the stewards of the project. Together, we worked with the W3C on creating this wiki-styled site and contributed thousands of web documentation articles....(more)