# Sunday, November 16, 2008

I have been doing a series of screencasts on SQL Server 2008. I noticed the other day that the first two have been posted.

Improve Performance and Storage Utilization with Data Compression covers the data compression feature and shows when and how it can help with performance and storage utilization.

Enable Transparent Data Encryption covers the transparent data encryption (TDE) feature. I really love this feature because it protects your data whenever it is written to disk. This alone could help solve a lot of problems with databases that are restored to servers that they shouldn't be or lost backup tapes.

The screencasts are designed to show how to do something from scratch so they are very focused and you get to see my (somewhat poor) typing skills as I build up SQL scripts.

I have a list of topics I am working through but I would love to hear what you find the most important or what you have questions about. If you have any topics that you would like me to cover just leave a comment here and I will see if I can get to it.

Sunday, November 16, 2008 4:34:15 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
# Tuesday, October 28, 2008

You can see screencasts and get news from PDC from a variety of sources including microsoftpdc.com so I won't try to capture every detail but instead put down my thoughts on what I learned/saw.

Today has been an Azure day. In the morning keynote Microsoft announced Microsoft Azure, their new operating system for the cloud. I have spent most of the rest of the day in sessions learning more about the cloud and what all it can do now and what it will do in the future. I have some small ideas for the SQL Services storage and how to use it. I just registered for my Azure account so I can test out the CTP.

One of the useful and impressive demos I saw was of a workflow that started out as a local WF workflow and then sent messages into the cloud where the workflow continued and finally messages were sent back to the originating workflow. I can envision scenarios where certain things like payroll or invoicing could be made part of the workflow and companies could reduce costs for commodity items that are not really part of their core business.

In other news the WCF REST starter kit was released on CodePlex. You can access it at http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet/Wiki/View.aspx?title=WCF%20REST. There is also documentation and other information at the WCF Developer Center REST site.

Also LiveID will become an OpenID provider. It is in CTP now but if it works and gains wide spread adoption it will enable a lot more "single sign on" scenarios. This looks like the first concrete step to come out of Microsoft agreeing to support OpenID.

finally, while not PDC related, TJay Belt had an article on duties for on-call DBAs featured at SQLServerCentral.com.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008 3:24:13 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  | 
# Thursday, July 10, 2008

According to eWeek at http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Microsoft-to-Deliver-SQL-Server-2008-in-August/ Microsoft announced that SQL Server 2008 will be released next month. I have been playing with the release candidate 0 for the last couple of weeks, specifically looking at the spatial data types. I have enjoyed it and can see many applications for this technology. I am looking forward to the full release.

Thursday, July 10, 2008 11:44:10 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  |