It’s all magic to me.

By Wesley Brown, 2009/04/05

"Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who do not understand it."

Arthur C. Clarke penned three laws of prediction

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The last is the most well known. I love the change that the comic strip freefall made to it and felt that was most appropriate to my day to day dealings with people and technology in general.

On a regular basis, I hear people describe SQL Server as a black box or magic box and working with it in any real depth is an art or wizardry. That simply isn’t so. It is science 100%. Not to take away from the designers and developers of SQL Server and the people that push the boundaries on what it is capable of, but it is all based fundamentally on engineering principles,math (relational algebra in particular) and the underlying technology of computers.

Once you demystify it, break it town into small enough parts you can quickly master the parts of it that effect your life in a reasonable amount of time.

One of the areas I focus on is I/O performance and SQL Server. So, I’ll be doing a multi-part post covering the entire I/O stack from how a hard disk works through SAN’s and eventually how this all effects SQL Server.

Hopefully you will find it useful.

Here is to my blogging endeavor!