SQLServerPedia

Every week, I send an email update to the SQLServerPedia Editors and Contributors, and now I’m also publishing them as blog entries here under the SQLServerPedia Status Updates category.  With no further ado, here’s last week’s:

New Color-Coded Syntax for T-SQL, Video Support

I’ve set up a Mediawiki extension for easy color-coded syntax formatting.  When you put in your code, put these source tags around it like this:

<source lang=”tsql”>
select @@servername
</source>

And you get beautiful (well, to developers anyway) color-coded syntax.  The full list of supported languages is listed on the Editing Help page (at the bottom of the page when you’re editing an article).  The source code is really easy to edit, so if you don’t get the color coding you want, let me know and I can change the MediaWiki code.  It’s not perfect: it doesn’t handle line breaks well in Internet Explorer.  If you put a massively wide query (like select a few dozen fields without hitting enter) it’ll be that wide on the page.  (I won’t be changing that part, heh.)

I’ve also added support to embed video inline.  You can see examples of both this and the T-SQL code syntax highlighting on the Editing Help page.

Live Webcast Scheduled for December 11th

Denny Cherry, Douglas McDowell, Greg Low, Jason Massie and Tim Ford will be on the webcast with me talking about what the site is, how we’re helping as editors, and so on.  I was originally going to do a slide deck for it, but I’m going to add the agenda in the wiki instead and we’ll share a web browser with the viewers.  That way we can click around in the site to illustrate points.

I blogged about the SQLServerPedia Editors webcast.  We’ve already got about 200 registrants, so I’m looking forward to this!

Popular Content This Week

The top 5 most frequently visited pages were:

• List of string functions in Michael Lato’s T-SQL section (and several other similar function pages are high hitters)
• The home page of Michael Lato’s T-SQL section
• The home page of Jason Massie’s T-SQL code library
• The list of SQL Server people on Twitter
• The home page of Ron Talmage’s T-SQL coding standards section

Popular Requests from Users

The most frequently requested pages follow, and I’ve set up skeleton pages for them:

• When to choose SQL Server Standard versus Enterprise (this just in: Michelle Ufford of SQLFool.com is tackling this one)
• A single page listing the SQL Server release dates, current versions & service packs along with download links
• SQL Server Management Studio Express – how to get it, what makes it different from the normal version, and what it costs.

Remember, the above pages are skeletons – they don’t have much content in ‘em yet.  Don’t go there expecting the perfect SQL Server resource – that’s where the wiki comes in!

That’s it for this week!  If you’ve got any questions shoot me a note.
Brent Ozar, Editor-in-Chief