Last weekend SQLServerCentral went down for almost a full day due to a DNS issue. I wrote about that mistake, and I've written about a few others as well, like one of our moves. I make mistakes regularly, and I think most IT people that are honest with themselves would admit to the same. It's part of how we learn, but making mistakes, assumptions, or errors and then correcting them.
We have active forums at SQLServerCentral, there are plenty at MSDN, and various other sites where people ask questions and get answers. Heck, I even use TractorByNet, which recently helped me fix a troubling bush hog problem. The people that answer questions on these forums are experts in their fields, but there are also plenty of people just like you that take a few minutes out of their day to contribute some of their knowledge.
Most of this is done with the best of intentions. I've really never seen anyone deliberately trying to give bad advice. Often people speak with the voice of experience, telling you what worked for them. And at times, it's bad advice.
One common piece of SQL Server advice I see is to run repair with DBCC if you find a corruption message in your CHECKDB output. It's horrible advice, and can lead to real data loss. If you're not sure why this is a bad recommendation, read this blog post. But time and time again I've seen people recommend this in forums as a possible solution to an error from CHECKDB.
That's a mistake made by people who don't know better or think they are really helping. So, how do you know who to trust? What advice to follow? The easy answer is that you need to take the advice you get, whether from me, some other SQL Server MVP, or an anonymous person trying to help, and verify it. Look through the documentation, get references from the person, and test what they've suggested.
Trust, but verify. It's a good policy.
Steve Jones
Steve's Pick of the Week
3SQLWords - It's silly, and probably a waste of time, but I got quite a few smiles on Twitter this week when someone started asking for three SQL words and tagging them. Some good ones in there.
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
Music presented by Incompetech and Kevin MacLeod
The podcast feeds are now available at sqlservercentral.podshow.com to get better bandwidth and maybe a little more exposure :). Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted, and you can get feeds from there.
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Today's podcast features music by Incompetech. Kevin Macleod has some great compositions in all genres of music. Check him out at www.incompetech.com.
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