There was an article last week with a great title: The Mother of All Genealogy Databases, and so I had to take a look at it. It talks about some of the large databases on the Internet that are collection public records and linking them together to help people find out about their individual and family histories. The largest site so far, Ancestry.com, supposedly has 5 billion records.

I'm sure some of you have many more records than that, but that's a pretty good sized amount of data to have in your database. I'm guessing this is records of people, so there are likely quite a few related records in there are well. That makes this one very interesting project from a DBA point of view.

Think about it. There are all kinds of challenges in this project for a DBA. First you have to collect records from all types of sources and then import them into your system. Along the way there are quite a few data cleansing challenges that will be necessary to correct mistkes.

Then you need a nice, well built database to support a web site. Lots of work with application developers to implement all types of searches, hierarchies, etc. that people will use to research things. You'll have to make it easy to correct mistakes as they're found, and of course there's the security, privacy, and legal implications of holding information about individuals and presenting it to others.

Overall it's not really something I'd want to tackle, but I bet it presents some very interesting challenges from the DBA point of view.

Same old, same old

I'm sure many of you have seen that there's a new look to the SQLServerCentral.com site. After many months of work, we have a new codebase, a new look and feel, and hopefully many bugs fixed.

However Database Weekly remains the same old, stodgy site.

We're working on that, though I'm not sure of the timeline. We didn't do any work on this site because this was a major production change and I needed to be sure that some things still worked. Like this site.

We've also found that most of you don't really come to the site, but just get the newsletter. So this is a lower priority, but I'm sure we'll change it at some point, adding RSS, the editorial, etc. to this site.

So let us know if there are things you'd like to see on this site in the future.

A Slow Week

Overall this was a fairly quiet week with most of the DBAs and writers in the SQL Server world attending the 2007 PASS Summit here in Denver. The biggest news that I saw some out of the conference was the finalization and release of Performance Point 2007 to RTM. Bill Baker announced that on Friday the 21st, and gave an interesting demo. If you do a lot of reporting on your business with various rules for report structures and want to integrate in some workflow, this might be an interesting product for you.

There's lots of blog coverage from various people's perspectives and I've included some, but most of it was "I attended a session and it was good. Then I went to something else and it was good." Repeat. So I haven't included those in the blogs.

For those of you I met at PASS, thanks for saying "hi" and I hope to see more of you next November in Seattle.

Steve Jones