SQLServerPedia

It’s been a great couple of weeks, and I’ve got a lot of good news to report.

We’re now syndicating 12 SQL Server blogs.

Last Tuesday, I posted a blog entry offering to syndicate SQL Server blogs on SQLServerPedia, and the results were swift.  Eleven people have signed up to syndicate their blogs already!  Tim Ford (aka SQLAgentMan on Twitter) and Colin Stasiuk (aka BenchmarkIT on Twitter) are the latest additions today.

I love waking up in the morning, looking at the site, and seeing great posts come out of nowhere – gems that ordinarily might not have gotten much visibility in the SQL Server community, but can now reach thousands of users.  In the coming weeks, I’ll be passing on tips to help your blog entries get the best reach in the community and ideas on what people are searching for.  For now, if you’re looking for blogging inspiration, check out the Article Requests section, where we’ve broken out hot topics by wiki area.  These would also make great blog posts.

A few more bloggers wanted to sign up, but they couldn’t.  They were posting their blogs at group blogging sites and didn’t own the rights to their content, unfortunately.  I harp about this in my series on How to Start a Technical Blog – if you’re just getting started with blogging and you’re not sure where to host it, I strongly recommend building your own brand.  At SQLServerPedia, everything we do is about a partnership with the community where everybody wins.  I personally want to make sure all of our contributors get the thanks and appreciation they deserve for helping give back to the community.  Speaking of which…

Upcoming Index Fragmentation Webcast with Michelle Ufford

Michelle takes performance seriously: she works for GoDaddy, a company that takes out some high-visibility ads during the Super Bowl.  The ads are specifically designed to drive users to their web site to see the full ad, and you can imagine that puts their servers under some serious load.  Michelle blogged about what it’s like to live through Super Bowl loads – think 27k transactions per second.

Part of surviving that kind of load is to defrag your indexes.  Michelle contributed some free index defragmentation scripts for SQL Server 2008 and 2005 in the wiki, and we’re going to raise community awareness of this technique with a webcast.  On March 12th, we’ll be doing a webcast on index defragmentation with Michelle Ufford and Jason Hall.  We’ll post more about this as the date gets closer.

Podcast Popularity Continues to Rise

We had almost 14,000 audio/video plays in January: people just can’t get enough of our SQL Server tutorials.  We’ve got more videos in the queue for February, and we’ve got some ideas around more interactive content.

Quest staff like me, Kevin Kline and Jason Hall frequently speak at local PASS chapter meetings.  We’re looking at the possibility of streaming those sessions live on the internet so that not just local members, but anyone can attend and ask questions.  More info on that in the near future.