Some quick hits on the news of the week from the perspective of a DBA.
The Security Outlook
SANS released the outlook for 2008 as well as a look back. As you might expect IE and Firefox were listed as having lots of vulnerabilities. No surprise there as these have been regularly patched this past year. Windows was on top, but a nice mention of issues with OS X and the various Linux flavors. Office, various other server software packages, but there was one conspicuous absense:
SQL Server.
They mentioned that there were problems with database management products, but when I searched for some security issues with SQL Server 2005, I didn't find any. Not that I'm ready to say SQL Server is the most secure platform, and there are still lots of bugs, but there's been a deafening silence about security with SQL Server. Nice to see.
Porsche v Ferrari
I like cars, but I view them in a practical sense. I have driven a Porsche and a Ferrari and while there's a speed difference, it doesn't really matter. They're both fast.
I saw this report about the TCP/IP stacks in Windows being put to a speed test. The comparisons were with client OSs (XP and Vista) getting data from servers (Windows 2K3 and 2K8). Vista with W2K8 came out at 3-4 times faster than XP with W2K3.
However fast is fast, and I'm not sure the issues with Vista hogging machines overcome any network stack gains.
Books Online
The September Update, as of 11/30/2007, is finally online here. I reported on this awhile back, expecting the link to be live immediately, but it never seemed to work.
I guess the end of September, when the new version was announced was the "launch" event, and this is the RTM.
C'mon people in the Pacific Northwest, you can't have your own time scale. This is embarrassing and it's dumb.
Virtualization
It's everywhere and I expect the trend to continue. Allen White makes some good points about why it's useful, and if you're a DBA not using it, you're missing out.
I am looking forward to the new offerings from Microsoft and others, and I can't wait until we have a hypervisor with a throttle, letting me give more "horsepower" to the VM that needs it at that time.
Top Ten Lists
I like top ten lists, probably stemming from years of watching David Letterman in college and afterwards. This week the SQL Customer Advisory Team blogged about a bunch of top ten items that you might want to know about. They're listed in the blogs below and I urge you to read through them.
Steve Jones
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Steve's Pick of the Week
Next Generation PC Design - an interesting contest by Microsoft. Personally I kind of like the bookshelf PC, especially if we can "dock" items like USB drives, iPods, etc. If you've got some creativity, submit something.
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The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
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