I'm bound by a non-compete agreement, actually two, from the sale of SQLServerCentral.com. I have one that was a time limited agreement not to engage in a competing business (another SQL Server site, essentially) for a fixed time span after the sale. I have another that is part of my employment that is similar, and is for a time frame beginning from when my employment were to be terminated.

It does seem the classic IT worker is more of a loner, a cowboy, someone that tends to build their own skills and either succeed or fail on their own. I don't know many technology professionals that would want to have to abide more and more rules, something a union usually brings into force both for employers and workers. I have been in places where someone wouldn't do a particular task because their union would not allow it, and to me, that's just seemed silly and counterproductive.

I've heard lots about how Microsoft does usability over the years. They actually put people in a room, they video and audio tape their actions, even retinal scanning at times to see where people are looking and evaluable their designs before building tools. It's a lot of effort, but then again, their software gets seen by so many people that it is worth the effort.

The MSDN combined blog page has lots of code, some announcements of a conference, various webcast and video notes, and more. Granted there are hundreds, if not thousands of blogs on MSDN, but it's still primarily a place where people write about work. The Google blog is similar, with topics across the board about Google, their products, and the world.

In any case, what might be even more amazing is that 65% of these laptops are not reclaimed. What's scary is that 53% of people surveyed said confidential company information was on their laptop and 65% said no effort was taken to secure their data. I found this on Bruce Schneier's blog, and he sees it as a huge dollar loss for the country if the numbers are correct.

We helped sponsor a contest, in conjunction with Red Gate Software who own this site, to find who are the exceptional DBAs out there deserving some recognition for not only doing their jobs, but also helping provide a great example for others on how to handle the challenges of their profession.

I've put together some of the funner bloopers from the past few months, some shown before, some not, but I hope you enjoy a smile at my expense.

Now that might not be impressive, but consider this. It's a 4TB array, and it exceeds the previous benchmark by 250% with 5% of the previous response time. It also uses on-fifth of the floor space and just over half the power. That's quite an improvement, especially as we are more and more concerned about space, power, and heat loads.

Most of the people working in IT seem to actually work pretty hard. They put in long hours, work after hours, and are on call pretty much all the time. And they seem to get called on a regular basis, so perhaps more than some other professions, IT workers really need to take vacations.

But could it back a million message system?

I think it could, though the entire system would need to be designed to work with SQL Server. My guess is that any of the main RDBMS platforms could back a system sending a million messages a second if the system were well designed. That sounds a little silly, but it seems most systems that are designed poorly don't run well regardless of the hardware and software platforms, while well built systems seem to always exceed their design parameters.

Recently we had a situation here at the ranch where a horse got caught in barbed wire. Luckily my wife and I were outside and saw it quickly, racing to cut the horse loose and bandage up his leg while calling the vet. Actually two of our kids helped and the horse survived to live another day. That was a true crisis and for awhile I thought we were going to have him die as we were standing there.

However you might feel about that, I think that you need to win or lose on your own merits. In my mind, and it's something I try to get my kids to understand, if I haven't achieved it on my own, if I haven't done the work and earned it, I didn't win. If I took a shortcut in the race and was the winner, I didn’t really win. I cheated.

Read the rest of If You Ain't Cheatin' at SQLServerCentral.com

Over the last 8 years in the US, I've seen quite a bit of interest in modernizing our voting systems in government. For most of my life paper ballots have been used in conjunction with some type of electronic reading device. It has always seem antiquated, and typically a tremendous amount of labor has been required to collect ballots and help manage the counting. After our ballot issues in 2000, many voting agencies rushed to implement electronic voting.

Security in SQL Server is actually a fairly simple model. There are logins to the server, which are mapped to users in a database. You can assign rights to both levels (depending on the permission) and you can group users into roles. However it starts to get complicated from there pretty quickly. We now have certificates that can log in with no login, schemas, and more in SQL Server 2008.

Awhile back we ran a guest editorial from Tim Mitchell about "The Zone," which provoked some great responses. It talked about the way we can focus so intently, so completely that we zone out, are intensely productive and even lose track of time. It's a feeling that I hope most people, especially developers can achieve and it's something I've really enjoyed during long runs or bike rides as well.

However there are lots of times when we don't want to concentrate so intently, or it's not beneficial. I'm sure most of you have run across a problem or series of problems and you are not sure how to solve them. You struggle to come up with a good solution, and it's like the next line in a song you can't remember; it's just out of the grasp of your mind.

In any case, as soon as we realized that it was lost, we called and started to cancel bank and credit cards, to limit the potential financial damages. It was a hassle, but it was good to see how quickly the banks reacted. Quite a few of them actually closed our account and opened a new one with new numbers to prevent identity fraud. Our debts and/or balances were transferred and new cards were issued. One bank actually cancelled my card as well, just to be safe, which was a hassle, but probably a good idea. I was disappointed that my other bank didn't do that automatically, allowing my card to still work.

Over the last few years, after Scott McNealy stepped down and Jonathan Schwartz became CEO, I've watched the company make a comeback, fighting for market share and actually succeeding in becoming a company that's worth admiring. I only follow a few blogs that I find interesting and Jonathan Schwartz's is one of them. He doesn't write a lot, but he is very interesting.

Now part of the reason that I started SQLServerCentral.com, as well as End to End Training, is that I believe in education. It's something that has always been a part of my career and something that I think always will be. My partners, Andy Warren and Brian Knight, believe the same thing and we know that to continue to be a great DBA, you have to continually invest in yourself.

Someone actually suggested to me that this might make a good topic as they noticed quite a few people that were interested in databases were also interested in martial arts. At first glance it might seem strange, after all, the traditional geek is more of a passive individual, someone that spends their spare time in virtual worlds they visit on the computer, on a TV screen, or in their minds while reading a book.

I'd like to say that I've never accessed data I wasn't supposed to, but I have. I admit it, I'm a little disappointed in myself, and I knew better. At one point I worked at a small company, I'd been there awhile, and I had to do some work to integrate our sales order/inventory system with the accounting system. Up until then we typically had 20-50 orders a day and those were manually entered into the accounting system. However we had taken on a new line of business with many more sales and we needed to dig through the system to find a way to import the data.

I think some capabilities in SQL Server have such a negative connotation that they are avoided at all costs. It is true that all of these features can lead to inefficient code, but a select statement in the wrong hands can lead to inefficient code as well. Does this mean we should avoid querying data all together to improve efficiency because someone may write a bad query?

At the end, they were told that they were really shown Vista, and that Mojave was an experiment to show that people's prejudice can really influence them. It's a good idea, and I like what they've done, but I'd also like to see what the people were shown, which things they saw on the screen and the actual actions performed. I'd also like to know the breakdown of people's use of computers.

Somewhat lost in the shuffle of the big announcement, but something I've seen on a few blogs, is that Bill Baker is leaving Microsoft. For those of you that are unsure of who Bill Baker is, he was the leader of the BI development group for a long time and is now moving to Visible Technologies, where I'm sure he'll do well.

In any case, as computer professionals, we tend to spend a lot of time resting on our rears in front of a computer screen. With so much stress and work in our lives, it's often that we find ourselves ready to relax in front of some type of media many nights. And with so much out there, it's easy to take a sedentary work style and carry it over to home.

This has felt like a very quick release, as quick as SQL Server 2000 felt after SQL Server 7 (that was two years), though not nearly as quick as the SQL Server 6.0 to 6.5, about six months. It's been just under three years since SQL Server 2005 was completed, but since I, and many others, are still learning new things about that version every week, it feels as though this version came out quickly.

Microsoft really has an opportunity, and to some extent an obligation, to provide some disclosure on how they test and what techniques they use to build better software. With specific examples based on KB articles and Connect reports, I'm sure many software developers could learn a lot.

"We did work in other fields in our '95 study. It was a slightly different pool, but we found that women across industries will often take a brief break -- like for two years. But our sense is that this is distinctly worse. In many fields, almost 100% of women will try to get back into the industry [later]. Here, only 60% say they would be willing to give it another try if conditions were right." (ComputerWorld)

I've also had to make decisions on where to host various companies' servers. That's ranged from a friend's basement in the early SSC days to choosing a large vendor that could sync up data for a larger company across multiple data centers. I've learned quite a bit over the years, something new almost every time I visit a new center, as this business has grown and evolved over time to respond to changing conditions and needs. I'm sure any day now I'll be seeing a data center with some solar panels or windmills up there to offset costs. Especially now that power is becoming a larger and larger cost in running a data center.

Read the rest of Pimp My Data Center at SQLServerCentral.com

I've written before about Nicholas Negroponte's assertion years ago (in Being Digital) that his laptop was worth 2 million dollars when questioned by customs officials. The officials were skeptical since it looked like an ordinary laptop computer, but Dr. Negroponte explained "It's the bits" that are worth millions.

For example, I get requests from people to link to me on Linked In and other sites constantly. I started with Linked in years ago, thinking that this site might not sustain me and so I became "linked" with some friends. Now I get 2-3 a week and I've given up trying to figure out how well I know the person. I approve every invitation and I know I'm liked to hundreds, if not thousands, of people. I even created a SQLServerCentral.com group after someone requested it. You can join if you like, I'll approve you, but it might take me a few days, so be patient.

OK, back to Monday morning. You are just going through logs and emails to make sure everything is running as it should, and it is. This is going to be a good week. As you continue to read email, you receive an invitation to meeting with a title referencing something you have not heard of, and next you notice that you are a required participant. Your interest is peaked. You ask around but no one seems to know what this is about. In 30 minutes you will find out, so you go back to your logs and email.

Gas is expensive for us, but I wasn't sure how much of a dent this is really making in people's budgets. After all, we drive a lot, having gone around 34k miles last year in the vehicles around here, ignoring the tractor and ATV. That's been at the cost of around $4k, or about $333 a month for gas. I talked to a few friends and it seems their spending is all over the board from $250 to over $500 regularly. We have one friend who works from home as well, and his wife doesn't work, but they manage to spend nearly $700 a month moving the family of 5 around.

I heard similar things 8 years ago about DBAs, that with SQL Server 7, us DBAs were becoming a bit obsolete. I had a friend a few years before that actually get out of IT. He had been a successful Windows sysadmin with a lot of Exchange experience at a large company with over 50,000 desktops. He was sure in 5 years time that so much of what he did on a daily basis would be automated and they're be no need to keep him around.

I think that most developers are naturally inquisitive and they like to solve problems. Computers give them the ability to shape the virtual world as they see it, in a way that many people can't do in the physical world. I think many developers are also lazy, using the power of computers through programming, macros, scripts, etc. to get work done quickly and avoid boring, repetitive tasks.

I've always been a fan of choosing a complicated, one-time password for service accounts, something that is hard to crack since these often are privileged accounts, at least within SQL Server. And since they rarely change in my experience, I had a question this Friday:

My typical way of working with virtual machines is to build a new image, hopefully keep that around, and then add the software I need. Lately I've been able to download images files, but for the most part I've built them and then migrated software or applications over, just like I would with a physical machine. It's a slow process, but I've learned to keep some base OS images on my disk, which speed up the process.

I love watching The Office on TV and it's one of my wife's and my favorite shows each week. No, not the British version, the funny one shown in the US :) (I have to make a few jokes about my colleagues in Cambridge now and again)

The value of an IT employee is probably impossible to predict. We have all sorts of certifications, tests, and more that we use along with an interview to make a decision about who to hire. In many cases is comes down to the "instinct" of the interviewer. Even then I'm sure that we find that the skills of those we interview often don't match up later with our expectations. They might greatly exceed or fall short of the performance we expect.

I've always thought that maintenance agreements were sold in a fear based manner, and not just for software. Extended warranties and other similar agreements are often added on with some sales pressure tactics. Most people don't understand that amount of use that they'll get from a product, whether it's a car or software, and they don't know what level of service or support they'll need.

I thought this was a rather amazing fact, though I'm not surprised by it. People that partially encrypt their disks, say for example the "My Documents" folder only,might have data leaking from the encrypted disk to the unencrypted disk.

How? It's mainly because of mainstream application such as Word and Google Desktop using temporary storage on other, unencrypted parts of the disk. That makes perfect sense if you think about it, after all, these applications need to create temporary versions while you're working, and they're not aware of encryption. Most likely if you use partial disk encryption, you should be sure that you encrypt the "temp" directories that your applications use.

Read the rest of The Database Weekly Update for July 21, 2008 at SQLServerCentral.com

What if you boss asked you to work on your "soft" skills. What if you are asked to work on your leadership, communication, negotiation skills, speaking skills, or teaching skills. Where do you turn? do you try to find a book and hope it has great information on what you are trying to learn? Do you take a college course? Are there seminars on soft skills? can you order training materials? I'm sure there are, but how do you know what is best for your situation?