SQLServerPedia

Most Popular Page: The Twitter Directory

The Twitter phenomenon surprises even me, a hardcore Twitterer, and it continues to gather steam.  The most popular page on the site is now the SQL Server Twitter directory.  This Tweet from Aaron Lowe was the final shot in a conversation a few people were having about where users are going now for their SQL Server answers (and I had nothing to do with that).

Rhys Campbell wrote a script that uses his Tweet-SQL components to follow everyone on our Twitter directory, and I got a big chuckle out of that.

New User Profile Pages

If you click on your name on the editor page, or anywhere else where a contributor or editor has done something (like the list of recent page edits), you’ll be taken to a new user profile page like this.

We’re not publicizing this much yet because there’s a few features we want to add, like the ability to syndicate your blog on your SQLServerPedia.  If you want, with a line of code you’ll be able to echo all of your blog postings on your profile page, but when users want to read the posts, they’ll go to your blog.  It’ll be a nice way to get more publicity for those of you who blog.

Want to Participate in a Restore Horror Story Webcast?

We’re doing a couple of Pain of the Week webcasts that should be fun.  On Thursday, March 6th, I’ll be talking about backup and recovery best practices – why you shouldn’t wait until disaster strikes before making your preparations.  On Thursday, March 19th, I’m going to cover DR horror stories – times when all hell broke loose and things didn’t go according to plan.

One of my favorites was a disaster recovery test a couple of years ago.  Management required us to test our DR plans twice a year in full blown production – fail over on a Saturday morning, run business out of DR for a week, and fail back the following weekend.  During one of the tests, we realized on Monday that we weren’t getting enough network throughput back to our primary datacenter.  We couldn’t keep our primary servers up to speed with our DR boxes, and they were falling farther and farther behind.  We realized we might not ever be able to fail back to production, so we had to stop the entire test, shut down some systems and start failing things back one at a time to free up bandwidth.

If you’d like to participate in either webcast, shoot me an email.  These happen at 8am Pacific, 11am Eastern.

Podcasts Coming Up: Script Library Showcase

Next week, I’ll be recording a few podcasts talking about scripts in the script library, and putting those online in the coming weeks.  I want to showcase the work Jason Massie and Michelle Ufford have put into some really useful scripts that I’ve already used several times.

That’s all for this week!  Have a great weekend.