Yesterday, as I was pulling into my driveway, my front left tire gave. Thankfully, I was going really slow and I was right at my house. I did the requisite email to my boss that I was going to be in late and the check to see what time the tire… Read more

I've been dealing with a security product from a security company in recent days that breaks best practices with respect to the database configuration. This has reminded me of the list of issues I've seen over the past six months that have raised my ire. I'll rail mostly at products… Read more

Saw this in the MSDN flash yesterday, MS has a new Silverlight site up (newest toy and all!) that focuses on security, but the part that intriged me is if you click on the virtual labs, there are some great exercises that walk you through actually hacking sites using various… Read more

Another book I read recently, The Long Tail by Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine goes into detail talking about some of the changes in retail brought on my the internet with the main premise (in my words) being that companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Itunes sell fewer copies of a… Read more

 The Windows Server Performance Team has published part 2 of troubleshooting memory issues.

This one covers excessive paging and memory bottlenecks. I like how when they list the performance counters, they give some real meat to them. For instance, there is a calculation to determine whether or not pages/sec… Read more

Microsoft and Seagate have partnered togethered to put together an IT Heroes comic (daily even). The first one is here:

   Heroes Happen Hero Comic Day 1

It's pretty funny. The son asks dad what he does because the son has to do a presentation at school on what his dad… Read more

 Ken Henderson passed away this past week. I found out about it from the MVP forums as well as from Manageability team.

The whole community remembers Ken and we are hoping to hear from his family soon and see if we can hep in any way. Flowers have been… Read more

I know I'm not the first in the SQL Server community to post this, but Ken Henderson has passed away Sunday evening:

   Ken Henderson - We Will Always Remember You  (SQL Server Manageability Team blog)

I learned a lot from Ken Henderson's Guru's Guide books. They… Read more

As I mentioned yesterday the article I wrote on IT Transparency is finally live today and now the wait to see what the response is! I hope you'll drop me a comment after you read it, either here on the blog or in the SSC forum attached to the article. Read more

I'll be there doing a presentation on Transactional Replication, and my friend Chris Rock will be doing on on LINQ to SQL. This will be my first time attending this event, so I'm looking forward to seeing some new speakers (not that I don't appreciate those that speak in Orlando/Jacksonville/Tampa!).… Read more

The new version of Metasploit is out. Included is a GUI interface. It's a complete re-write in Ruby (note to self, learn more about Ruby) whereas the previous version were in Perl.

  The Metasploit Framework site

If you aren't familiar with Metasploit, here's what it does (taken verbatim from… Read more

First saw this off of Planet MySQL:

 New Vendor Neutral Database Certification (Dave's Stuff)

Following the link to the CIW site, there are six domains that are being tested:

1. Relational Database Fundamentals
2. Relational Database Design and Application
3. Normalization and Database Design
4. Structured Query Language (SQL)…

Read more

 Citrix is changing the name of its flagship product from Citrix Presentation Server (CPS) to XenApp. More from the blogosphere:

• Citrix Presentation Server has left the building, XenApp is the new name (Brian Madden)
  
• Citrix Presentation Server is now XenApp (MSTerminalServices.org)

I know the name change… Read more

Tomorrow SSC is scheduled to publish an article I wrote on IT Transparency which gives a first person account of one strategy I used to try to make it a little easier for the business to see where IT time/money was going. Debated over whether to publish it, not necessarily… Read more

Saw this first on Aaron Stebner's blog:

  .NET Framework 3.5 deployment guides have been published on MSDN

Guidance information for both developers and administrators are linked from Mr. Stebner's post. He also provides a list of his previous blog posts which contain information not found in the deployment… Read more

This one is geared towards IT management:

 IT Manager Webcast: Dynamic IT and Security (Part 4 of 5): Identity and Access (Level 200)

It looks like the idea behind the webcast series is to turn spending on security from just a cost center to something that improves business.

It… Read more

I'll be visiting the Charlotte SQL Group on Feb 27th and I'll be doing one of my favorite presentations, Transactional Replication for Beginners (and probably talking a little about career development as well). I'm looking forward to the trip, always fun to see how other user groups work and to… Read more

The Jan 2008 issue of Software Test & Performance Magazine  (available as free PDF download, you can also download back issues through 2004) has an article called 'Gauging Performance in the Absence of Metrics' that I found interesting. From a SQL perspective it's a good read because it talks about… Read more

I try to be pretty careful about what I write about, and now being an MVP and actually getting information sent to me, on the record, but under NDA, I'm especially careful. It's cramping my style slightly, though more I have to think about whether or now I can actually… Read more

On the Microsoft Data Platform Insider blog, there is a post indicating new roadmap dates:

  Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Roadmap Clarification

It looks like SQL Server 2008 Release to Manufacturing (RTM) will occur in the 3rd quarter of 2008. Release candidate is said to come out in the… Read more