SQLServerPedia

We’ve had several bloggers sign up for syndication since our last Letter to the Editors, but rather than name them individually, I’m going to send you over to the SQLServerPedia Bloggers List.  We’ve hit 50 bloggers, but not all of them have sent me bios & photos.  If you’d like to be included on this list, email me a short bio and a head shot photo.

Collaboration of the Month: Wait Types

I hear from users that they’d like to help with the wiki, but they don’t know where to start.  To solve that, we started a Collaboration of the Month – every month, we’re going to focus on promoting a specific article/area of the wiki.  We’re going to devote internal efforts to enhancing that wiki article, and at the end of the month, we’ll reward members of the community for contributing.

I’m looking for ideas on how to give back to the community contributors.  If you’ve got thoughts, let me know.

Today’s Secret Word: VARCHAR

While writing a blog post in WordPress, Michael Swart found an interesting bug.  If you create a post with VARCHAR and then an opening parenthesis after it, your WordPress server may not save the post.

Read more about The Forbidden String at MichaelJSwart.com.

Most Popular Posts for January 2010

Here’s the blog posts that got the most hits last month:

1. Backup Log with Truncate_Only is a Bear Trap – Brent Ozar
2. Implementing Analysis Services Drilldowns – Chris Webb
3. Top 5 Indexing Best Practices – Tim Ford
4. Grant Truncate Table Permissions – Bob Horkay
5. Grant Execute on All Stored Procedures – Jeremiah Peschka
6. SSMS Saving Changes Not Permitted – Pinal Dave
7. When to Update Statistics – Colin Stasiuk
8. Deleting the Transaction Log – Gail Shaw
9. Verify Block Size on NTFS – Bob Horkay (Two in the top 10! Way to go, Bob.)
10. SQL Server 2008 R2 – Jason Strate

This month is shaping up to be another exciting month for us – we just had our first 9,000 visit day on Tuesday, February 2nd!

How to Play YouTube Videos In Your Blog

I’ve been working with WordPress 2.9’s new ability to embed YouTube videos in posts.  It’s absurdly easy – you just put the YouTube URL on its own line, all alone, like this (click to enlarge):

Embedding YouTube Videos in WordPress

And when WordPress renders the page, it automagically puts in a Flash video player with the right size of video.  You can even upload high definition videos to YouTube, and viewers will get the option of playing in 720p high definition.  The only downside is that videos can’t be longer than 10 minutes – but then again, people don’t pay attention that long anyway.

SQLServerPedia’s WordPress installation isn’t up to v2.9 yet, but feel free to get started embedding videos now.  We’ll catch up pretty soon, and I’m excited to see what the community creates.  Speaking of stuff we’re creating…

Sneak Preview of Upcoming Stuff

I can’t say anything yet, but here’s a peek:

Sneak Peek

More news as it happens!

It’s been a little while since my last update, and there’s plenty of things to cover.  Buckle your seat belts…

Blog Syndication News

Not a week goes by that I don’t hear from a blogger thinking about joining us.  Our latest additions are Adam Haines and David Dye, as I announced on my blog recently, plus Jonathan Gardner (who I’ll announce shortly.)

We’ve reached a point where we’re turning down more syndication requests than we’re accepting.  The chief problem right now is the language barrier: we’re getting a lot of international interest from bloggers who either write in another language, or English isn’t their primary language.  As an experiment, I put out a call on Twitter asking if any volunteers would like to help these bloggers with their English, and I got an overwhelmingly positive response.  From now on, that’ll be the approach I use.  After the blogger has worked with a volunteer editor for a couple of months and has improved their writing, we’ll reconsider them for syndication.

The secondary reason for denial is plagiarism.  When a new blogger approaches us, I go back through their history and double-check things like scripts, images, and explanations.  We can’t syndicate material with any content copied from somewhere else, and Books Online is no exception.  If you need to quote things in order to support your article, you need to properly attribute them with a link back to the source, and you need to make it clear that it’s not your own work.  If it’s copyrighted material, you need to get permission from the original author.  For more on the topic, check out my Q&A post on plagiarism.

In the coming months, we’ll still continue to see a steady rise in the number of syndicated bloggers because we’re working to bring more and more benefits for both writers and readers.  To show you where we’re going, I’m going to start by talking about where the SQL Server community is at right now.

Right Now: Content is Hard to Filter

Some of us are voracious readers, going through hundreds or thousands of blog posts, tweets, and question/answer posts per week.  We digest and sort through tons of content, and we try to share the best content with other readers by:

• Doing weekly link posts
• Sharing items in Google Reader
• Saving bookmarks in social networking sites
• Talking about links in Twitter

None of these are really good solutions because they don’t scale well to non-web-savvy users.  Typical DBAs love things like email newsletters because the newsletter editors do all the filtering work.

Sites like Digg, DotNetKicks, and Reddit accomplish the filtering part.  These sites let users vote on content, and the best content bubbles up to the front pages of these sites.  This is better than nothing, because at least now users can go to those sites to see what’s popular right now on a given topic, but it doesn’t work well for users who don’t surf the web often.  Those users want an email newsletter with the highest rated blog posts, wiki articles, answers, and so on, all in one place – preferably without tons of spam.

However, even where these sites succeed, they fall down when it comes to people.  If the same one person writes three really popular SQL Server clustering articles in a row, these sites don’t really catch on and recognize that the author might be somebody to keep an eye on.

Right Now: Mentors are Hard to Find

One of the challenges with the DBA career is that we often work alone.  We get thrown into this job by accident when our SQL Servers need a helping hand or when the only DBA leaves.  Suddenly we have all these new responsibilities, nobody to mentor us, and no trusted local advisors we can call for a second opinion.

Several years ago when I was an accidental DBA with no training whatsoever, struggling to wring performance out of our SQL Server, our company decided to call in the best local consultants.  We showed them our infrastructure and asked, “How can we make our transaction log backups faster?”  They ran Perfmon and their eyes got big.  They insisted something must be wrong, because there was no way we could possibly be doing this many transactions per second.  After they double-checked their numbers and said they’d never seen a system doing that many transactions per second, my manager and I looked at each other and realized we were screwed.

We wanted more than answers – we wanted people.  We wanted to find someone who had similar systems with similar needs, and we wanted to share our experiences with them.  We wanted to build a relationship with someone long-term.  We knew there had to be people out there like us, but we didn’t want to stumble through forums looking for someone with a particular profile.  We didn’t have the time to read hundreds of blog posts to find the right answers or learn the best practices.

What User Profiles Could Look Like

The first site to open my eyes about how profiles might be different was Halopedia.  It’s a wiki with a MediaWiki back end, just like SQLServerPedia, and they take user profiles pretty seriously.  On this sample user profile, check out the content:

• User score – determined by their contributions to the community
• Recent blog posts
• Recent comments on other content
• Changes they’ve made to the wiki
• Gifts they’ve been given by other users
• Awards they’ve won for their work

Their user profile starts to grow bigger than just who they say they are (A/S/L), and starts to show what they do.  Why not take it to the next level – beyond just their wiki and blog activity, why not let them integrate their:

• Twitter feed
• StackOverflow and ServerFault activity
• Or anything with an RSS feed

And then let other users rate and comment on all of it, and have those ratings affect the user’s reputation?  The more people like my stuff, the more my reputation grows.  Suddenly, if I want to search for, say, replication, I can see the users with the highest ratings for that particular keyword, read the highest-rated things they’ve written, and maybe approach them to mentor me or do some consulting to fix problems in my environment?

Where SQLServerPedia is Going in 2010

In 2010, SQLServerPedia is focusing on two things: quality content, and now, and quality people. We want to hook you up with the right readers for your content – no matter where you write it – and promote more interactivity between you and your readers.

At the same time, we’re also focusing on making the experience easier for readers so that they can get the right content for their needs without trying to drink from the firehose of content out there.

I’m excited about what’s coming, and I can’t wait to share it with you early next year.  In the meantime, happy holidays!

The SQLServerPedia Dream Trip contest is going wild and crazy.  We’ve got new bloggers left and right (over 30 now), new wiki articles going in, and it’s been a free-for-all.  Part of me is glad this contest hasn’t caught on any bigger, because I’ve had my hands full editing incoming articles, setting up blog syndication and working with new authors.  I didn’t think to clear off my calendar when we set up the contest, and my other job duties keep getting in the way!  Good problem to have.

New Video on How to Create Wiki Articles

The one question I kept getting was, “How do I create an article?”  I recorded a ten-minute video walking through the process of creating a new article, copying the template, and editing it.  You can check out that video now in the how-to-contribute page.  There’s a lot of other good resources on that page too, so make sure to check through those when you’re building an article.

Editors: Want More Wiki Articles in Your Section?

There’s still two weeks left before the SQLServerPedia Dream Trip contest finishes, and that makes a great conversation starter:

“Hey, wanna win a free trip to the PASS Summit?  All you have to do is contribute a wiki article.  I’m an Editor, and I can give you some ideas of articles we need in my section….”

That’s an easy way to get more articles into your section with a minimum of arm-twisting.  You can point people to that new how-to-create-articles video, or point them to the article on how to convert blog posts into wiki articles.

Reshaping the Editors Soon

So many of us have changed a lot in the last year.  Our jobs have changed, we’ve picked up different after-hours activities, and our personal focus may have changed.  Here at SQLServerPedia, we’ve been changing too, and we’ve learned a lot about what it takes to build a community of active users.

With that in mind, we’re going to reshape our Editorial board soon.  Originally, we looked for expertise in specific SQL Server topics, but we’ve learned that’s not as important as we thought.  Instead, we’re going to look for people who:

• Blog actively
• Are active on social networking communities like Twitter and Facebook
• Recruit others to join via blogging or wiki article contributions
• Lead local user groups or do frequent presentations

I’ll be contacting each of you individually over the next couple of weeks to talk about this reshaping process.  I understand there’s a lot of people who are passionate about SQL Server, but not as passionate about the networking side of the business.  Until the rapid ascent of social networking, that was completely okay, but these days, the folks who are really making a difference are the ones who are active in social networking.

If you’d like to become more active in social networking, I’d love to help, just as I’ve helped dozens of bloggers get started lately.  If you’re not interested, that’s okay too – not everybody is aggressive about building their brand online.  However, we’re going to start looking for people who can help build their own brand – and SQLServerPedia’s – at the same time.

Top 10 Blog Posts for This Month

Here’s the posts with the highest traffic for the last 30 days, not including my contest announcement, which got first place because anytime you give away thousands of dollars worth of stuff, people pay attention, hahaha:

1. Implementing Real Analysis Services Drilldowns in SSRS – Chris Webb
2. DBAs Behaving Badly: Manual Administration – Rod Colledge
3. Grant EXECUTE Permissions on All Stored Procs to One User – Jeremiah Peschka
4. Grant Truncate Table Permissions – Bob Horkay
5. Top 5 SQL Server Indexing Best Practices – Tim Ford
6. String Concatenation on a Text Column – Colin Stasiuk
7. How to Create a Server-Side Trace – Jorge Segarra
8. Deleting the Transaction Log – Gail Shaw
9. SSMS Changing Table Not Permitted – Pinal Dave
10. Fastest Way to Get Data from DB2 to SQL Server – Steve Novoselac

Congrats to these bloggers for writing popular stuff!

The contest is on!  We’re giving away a free trip to the PASS Summit for people just getting started in the community, folks who’ve never been to the Summit before.  They get an entry every time they add a new wiki article, contribute to two existing wiki articles, or syndicate four blog entries.  They can enter as many times as they’d like.

The grand prize is an all-expenses-paid trip to the PASS Summit in Seattle complete with airfare, hotel, and a netbook!  I’ll draw the winner live on a webcast with Tim Ford on October 1st.

For complete rules and details, check out my blog entry about the contest.

New Syndicated Bloggers: Brad Corbin, Brad Schulz, Jen McCown

Word of the contest has already brought three new bloggers to the site!  I introduced our new bloggers in a post this morning, and I’m working on setting up Brad Corbin’s blog as we speak.

If you know somebody who’s been on the fence about blogging, get them to talk to me.  I’m working to make the process as easy as possible for new bloggers.  All you have to do is buy your domain name, and I’ll set up hosting and WordPress for you.  All you have to do is bring your SQL brainpower.  I’ve spent enough of my life configuring WordPress already that I can get a new blog going in about 15 minutes – no sense in you spinning your wheels figuring that stuff out.  I’m here to help!

Video Podcasts Rocketing Up the Charts

The SQLServerPedia Video Podcasts are now in 3rd place in the iTunes store for SQL Server.  The top two spots are held by Microsoft podcast feeds that haven’t been updated in months, so I’m gunnin’ for number one.

We’re doing more and more guest podcasts lately.  If you’re interested in doing one, check out these examples:

• Slide presentation style – Colin Stasiuk talks about SQL Server auditing
• Interview style – Tom LaRock and I talk about plagiarism
• Demo style – Tom LaRock and I walk through Policy-Based Management

If there’s a topic you’d like to cover, pick a presentation style and a topic and email me at Brent.Ozar@Quest.com.  I’ll work with you to make the process easy and painless.  We even help you host it on your own blog – check out how it looks on Colin’s site and on Tom’s site.  This can really help show off your knowledge of a subject and your willingness to help the community.

New SQL Server Integration Services Editor: Allan Mitchell

We had so much good Business Intelligence content that we broke it out into three separate sections: SQL Server Analysis Services, SQL Server Integration Services and SQL Server Reporting Services.  With the coming release of the BI-focused SQL Server 2008 R2, it’s more important than ever to advance community education about this hot topic.

I’m proud to announce that our SSIS section will be edited by Allan Mitchell.  Allan Mitchell is the joint owner of Konesans Ltd, a small UK based consultancy specializing in SQL Server.  He is a SQL Server MVP and co-author of the book Professional SQL Server 2005 Integration Services.

New Syndicated Bloggers: Kevin Kline, Mladen Prajdic, Ross Mistry

I blogged about these three new additions to our web family, and I included an offer.  If you’re a syndicated SQL Server blogger (or if you’d like to be), and you’re currently blogging under a group site like Blogger or Wordpress.com, I’ll help you put your own roof over your head.  I’ll buy your domain name, set up WordPress for you, and give you a year’s worth of WordPress hosting.  I’m that serious of a believer that everyone should have their own web brand, and the sooner you start, the better.

If you’re not already a syndicated blogger with us, check out our article on how to syndicate your blog with SQLServerPedia.

Blogger and Editor Task: Recruiting Contributions

Make That Wiki Duty

The one thing I’ve learned in the last six months is that people are intimidated by the phrase “write a wiki article.”

People of every qualification level seem to think they’re not smart enough, not experienced enough, or not English-savvy-enough to write a wiki article.  Folks, I’m here to say you’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and doggone it, people like you.

So I’m enlisting our bloggers and editors for help.  Whenever you see a blog post and you think it would make a really good wiki article, contact the blogger and say:

“Hi, I’m from the future.  Your blog post is going to be a really popular wiki article that’s going to be edited and enhanced by a lot of other people.  Trust me – you’re going to be huge on the Internet.  Would it be okay if we took your blog post, shined it up a little, posted it on SQLServerPedia’s wiki, and gave you lots of credit?  You’ll also be put into the running for Wiki Article of the Month, which comes with a lot of cool prizes.”

If the blogger says yes, forward that email to me at Brent.Ozar@Quest.com.  I’ll work with you and the Quest Software editing team to polish up the blog post in a wiki-friendly way and get it into the blog with as little work on your part as possible.

(That reminds me – we’re also picking out the Wiki Article of the Month for July as I write this.)

Brett Updated the SQLServerPedia Plumbing

Our coding whiz kid, Brett Epps (Twitter), has been hard at work updating the plumbing behind the scenes.  We’re on a newer version of WordPress and a lot of its related plugins.  We’re working towards a major release in the coming months, and we’re all really excited about some of the new capabilities.  Stay tuned!

This week, we have some developments that make me proud to wear the big hat around here.

Comments On Your Stories Belong On Your Site

Brett Epps blogged about the latest round of improvements to SSP.  Most of ‘em focus on making the site load faster, but my favorite one has nothing to do with performance.

As of today, syndicated blog posts don’t have a separate comments area on SQLServerPedia.  If visitors want to comment about your blog entry, they’ll click on a link to go to your own web site.  This isn’t just a switch you can throw in WordPress, either – we couldn’t have done it without Brett’s PHP/MySQL work under the hood.

This keeps all the discussion about a post in a single place, which makes life easier for bloggers.  Readers can interact better with each other regardless of where they found your blog initially.  Plus, if like me, you’ve implemented a Subscribe to Comments plugin for your blog, then readers will get notified whenever anyone else posts a comment too.  Since all comments will be happening in one place, it makes readers more likely to return as new comments are posted in one place.

This also perks up the activity on your blog.  As a blogger, I know it can be frustrating to put a lot of work into an entry and then not get any comments.  If comments ended up on SQLServerPedia, that’s cool, but it’s not as cool as having them end up on your own site.  Then as readers stumble across your site, it’ll look more active.

I don’t want to syndicate your site’s comments over to SQLServerPedia because I want you, the blogger, to have incentives you can use to bring traffic to your own blog.  To make it easier, use FeedBurner FeedFlare to add comment links to the bottom of your posts, because FeedBurner can automatically update the number of comments.  I talk about using FeedBurner FeedFlare in my Tips for Syndicated Bloggers.

Solving Plagiarism Problems

A web site popped up on the radar recently for attempting to plagiarize just about everyone in the database community.  They used RSS feeds to suck the content out of blogs and show it on their own site without any attribution whatsoever.  Several of us bloggers contacted the site and demanded that our content be taken down, and Quest’s legal department sent cease & desist letters to the site.  Eventually, the site’s hosting company intervened after we began sending DMCA violation notices, and the site’s down for the count right now.

For more in-depth coverage of the story, check out my posts on How to Take Action When Your Site is Plagiarized and the followup More Thoughts on Blog Plagiarism.

Is Your Biography Up to Date?

No, we’re not worried about writing your obituary, even though the #celebpocalypse keeps claiming more victims.  Instead, we’re kicking around the idea of including your bio from the SQLServerPedia Editors and Contributors page at the bottom of every blog entry you write.  If there’s anything you’d like to update, take a moment to go edit that page.  Try to resist the temptation to edit the bios of others.

Today I’ve uploaded many under-the-hood changes to SQLServerPedia designed to improve site performance.  SSP began life on a crowded, run-of-the-mill shared hosting box, and this spring we began to outgrow it.  Earlier this month, we moved the site to a fresh, speedy server at WebFaction, and response times have improved dramatically.  With our server problems largely solved, today’s update focuses on client-side performance:

• Common JavaScript, CSS, and image files have been minified where possible using YUI Compressor and moved to a content delivery network (Amazon CloudFront).  HTTP headers on these files have been set to ensure they are cached.
• Where possible, images have been combined into one graphic (specific regions are shown using CSS), saving on HTTP requests.
• We’ve tweaked our stylesheet to reduce the number of images needed to show a page significantly.
• WordPress full-page caching has been enabled on the blog.
• Our two main applications, WordPress and MediaWiki, have been upgraded to their latest versions, bringing further bug fixes and performance improvements.

There are a couple of other changes you may notice:

• We’ve disabled comments on syndicated blog posts.  We felt that it made more sense to keep discussions contained on our contributors’ websites.
• Our generic bookmark icon (also known as a favicon) that shows up in your location bar has been replaced with a snazzy new one.

Our next update will come in another couple of weeks and will center on improving our feed aggregator (this blog) and adding more social features to the site.  Until then, keep sending us your feedback and contributions – SSP is nothing without its community!

This post is coming to you through our new and improved web server.  I’m not saying we’re Digg-proof, but we’re in pretty good shape, and we’re making more infrastructure improvements as we speak.  That stuff is mostly invisible to you, dear reader, so let’s cut to the stuff you’re interested in:

New Wiki Articles

We’ve added several new articles recently:

• Find Tables Without Primary Keys – a T-SQL script by Jason Strate.
• Indexing Partitioned Tables – Michelle Ufford talks about what a partitioned index is and when you should use one.
• Killing Sessions with SQL Server Integration Services – learn how Chris Webb uses SSIS to make database administration easier.
• Moving SQL Server Logins Between Servers – Greg Low explains why logins fail after a database is restored to another server.
• SQL Server Troubleshooting Tips and Tricks – Michelle Ufford shares some of her favorite SSMS shortcuts.
• Using Checksum to Load Data into Slowly Changing Dimensions – Steve Novoselac shows why the SCD wizard isn’t always the fastest way to load data.
• Using the Right Indexes for Optimal Performance – Pinal Dave shows query plans of clustered and nonclustered indexes.

I’d like to thank these bloggers for working with us to get the articles through editing and into the wiki.

Upcoming “Best of SQLServerPedia” Publications

This may come as a bit of a shock to you, so you might want to sit down.

It turns out that not everyone on the planet has been to SQLServerPedia yet.

I know – it’s crazy.  Fortunately, I work in the marketing department, so I can fix that problem.  (How often do you hear SQL guys say that, huh?)  PASS Summit attendees in Seattle get a handout bag with session schedules, attendee information and ads from vendors.  We’re putting together a “Best of SQLServerPedia” publication to include in the handout bag.  It’ll have some of the best wiki articles contributed by you folks.

If you’d like to see your name in print and have thousands of DBAs carrying it around with them, think about contributing an article to the wiki.  Read our article on How to Contribute New Articles, and if you’re stumped for topics, read our Article Requests.  We can also repurpose your older blog entries into an article too: I’m working with Gail Shaw and Jason Massie to turn several of their related posts into long wiki articles.

Top Blog Posts in the Last 30 Days

Here’s what’s been popular lately:

1. Data Mining the StackOverflow Database by Brent Ozar (whoa, that’s the first time I’ve come out on top in forever)
2. SSMS 2008 Saving Changes Not Permitted by Pinal Dave
3. Implementing Real Analysis Services Drilldown in a Reporting Services Report by Chris Webb
4. Grant Truncate Table Permissions in SQL Server by Bob Horkay
5. Grant Execute Permissions on All Stored Procedures to a Single User by Jeremiah Peschka
6. String Concatenation on a Text Column by Colin Stasiuk
7. How to Check Existence of a Temp Table Before Dropping by Pinal Dave
8. My Top 5 SQL Server Indexing Best Practices by Tim Ford
9. What TCP Port is SQL Server Running Under? by Colin Stasiuk
10. MySQL Dump File to SQL Server by Bob Horkay

Next time around, I’ll include the top 10 wiki articles too.

SQLServerPedia has been updated again today, and this time we’ve added two things.

Syntax highlighting for blog posts.  This feature is not quite production quality, so we’d really appreciate bug reports and feedback if you see any problems.  Currently we’re assuming all code you post is T-SQL.

The highlighting looks like this:

Sweet Precious Code

If you hover your mouse over the code, check out the options at the top right of the code:

Presto Changeo

You can pop the code in a new window, copy it for pasting into your production database server without checking, or print it for later entry by hand.  Check out this blog post by Grant Fritchey for examples.

The other change is a new video player on the wiki. We’re now using LongTail Video’s excellent JW FLV Player, the same one we use on the blog.

Stay tuned for another, more significant update in the next couple of weeks which will be focused on improving site performance.  As always, feel free to contact me by email or Twitter with any technical problems.

Today I’ve updated SQLServerPedia once more.  This update includes:

• A new syntax highlighter for the wiki (coming soon to the blog as well).  If you’d like to use the same one on your site, you can download the plugin here. It’s free and open source!  Our thanks go to Alex Gorbatchev for this great little plugin.  You can see it in action on pages with T-SQL like the Find Missing Indexes article.
• A more stylish related posts / about this post section on blog posts.
• Links to authors’ websites from syndicated blog posts.

We have a lot of ideas for future improvements, but we’re not quite ready to reveal them yet.  If you have ideas of your own, feel free to sound off in the comments section or send a tweet or DM @SQLServerPedia or @eppsilon.