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):

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:

More news as it happens!