Things I found interesting this week (only two days late).
General
The Leonardo da Vinci Guide To Being A Renaissance Man – Dumb Little Man is always good for helpful tips, but this is a great guide to tapping into your natural curiosity and drive and taking it to the next level. I have to admit that’s a good part of how I’ve gone from a Bachelor’s degree in English to where I am now in only 8 years.
Brent Ozar put together a great post on SQLServerPedia about getting ahead by saying no. This is definitely great advice that I could have used at the beginning of my career and could still do a better job of paying attention to.
Development
Zones of Quality – Oren Eini (probably better known as Ayende Rahien) outlines his approach to creating layers of software and isolating the ones where quality matters. It’s an interesting approach, and one that I haven’t seen before, however I definitely appreciate the approach of creating quick and sloppy implementations of the unimportant code knowing that you will return to fix it later.
PDC Session list – Robert Cain thoughtful collected links to all PDC sessions and wrote a batch file to rename them all to something more useful than AA12345.WMV.
Web platform installer – Getting up and running with ASP.NET on Vista/Win2008 just got easier with this new tool from Microsoft.
SQL Server
How long is left after killing a process? – How to get a progress report from SQL Server when you’ve KILLed a process.
Scalar functions are evil – Just in case you needed a little reminder about just how they’re evil. I forget sometimes and have to remind myself.
Social computing for the DBA – Us data folks aren’t always the most social lot on the planet, so it’s always nice to get a reminder of how to get out there and use new technologies. Jason isn’t presenting until December 3rd, so there’s plenty of time to put this one off.
Whoops: the DBA Quiz – database administrators blog about their mistakes. Chris Shaw started this, Brent Ozar called me out to admit my mistakes. Other notables involved include Jason Massie, David Stein, and SQLBatman.
