Happy Labor day to everyone. A day off for me, but I’m posting a few bloopers from the past couple months. These are the raw files, and I had about 40 minutes of stuff that I just dumped out raw and uploaded in four parts to YouTube.
Enjoy
Author: way0utwest
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Six Trips
Six trips left to close out this year. Most are very short, so that’s good, but still, it’s a bunch of packing and prepping to do.
Here’s my list:
Sept 25 – SQL Saturday #52, Denver Tech Center, OK, so not a real trip, but still I’ll essentially be gone for a day and a half from home with a late Fri night, all day Sat, getting home late Sat night. On the plus side, I get to hang with Jack Corbett from Orlando while his wife talks horses with my wife.
Oct 1-3 – SQL Saturday #53, Kansas City, speaking here, and getting to a Royals game for the first time ever. *cool*
Oct 19 – Boulder SQL Server User’s Group – It’s a day trip, but over an hour from my house to the group, so I’ll count it.
Nov – Nov 2 – 5 am – SQL Connections and Dev Connections and the Las Vegas SQL Server User’s Group. SQLServerCentral is sponsoring a track and Jason Brimhall convinced me to make good on my promise of speaking to his group Thur night.
Nov 7 – 8 – Heading to Seattle to take care of some admin stuff and hang out with Brent Ozar for a day.
Nov 19 – Nov 21 – NYC. SQL Saturday #59. A last minute decision, but I want to support these groups and this will cement my Premier status for United for next year 😉
I’ve got a couple ski trips with the family planned as well (Thanksgiving and Christmas), so it looks like a busy fall for me.
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Another E-Reader
No, it’s not a new device. This time it’s my son, Delaney, who has been reading on my old iPhone regularly.He started when he got through a series of science fiction that I had purchased in paperback and wanted to read the last book. Unfortunately I only had it in e-reader form, and told him he could buy it, or read it on the Kindle app. I had upgrade my iPhone this year, and kept the other one as a spare. He grumbled a few days and then decided that saving some money was worth it, and he read the book electronically.
Then he accessed my library, and read 6 more science fiction books I had in there over the next few weeks. Recently I asked him what he thought of e-reading. He had been down on it at first, and wasn’t thrilled with it. A month in, he answered in the same way as my wife (and me).
“It’s really convenient.”
He told me that worrying about battery was a little hassle, but not a big one since we have iPod chargers all around the house. He said that the screen was a little small, and he’d like to be able to flip less, but ultimately he said that being able to just go to the next book, and having 5 or 6 or 100 books in your pocket was cool.
He’d started carrying the iPhone around, especially on errands. He’ll read in bed, in the car, before karate, just about any place, and being able to immediately get the next book, or switch books, is huge for him.
I think that’s the best part of e-reading. I do miss the covers, and would like color for a few things. I’d like better imaging for photos of illustrations, but for the most part, convenience far outweighs all of that. I can hold my iPhone and read for a much longer time than I could with a Kindle device. But ultimately, being able to buy books from Amazon, BN, or anywhere else is the key win for me.
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Appliances – Just Add Data
The first release of a large data appliance from Microsoft is the SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse Edition in which you buy a rack of pre-configured servers that you access with tools and perform limited management on. I was reminded of this as I read about Teradata’s new product strategy, it seemed that they have integrated an appliance in there as well.Appliances bring some value to customers by supposedly reducing some of the tuning, configuration, setup, etc. costs in setting up a system. Hopefully the also reduce some ongoing costs that might come from mis-configuration, things running slowly, etc. How many times has an inexperienced person setup a server in a way that causes issues for an application?
However appliances tend to be expensive. They have to be if there is any level of support from the vendors in custom tuning. That limits how many places will purchase them, and there is also some level of distrust and fear from IT workers that worry about being displaced by a machine. Almost funny when you think about many of our systems displacing other jobs.
Appliances haven’t had great success in the past, outside of network devices, but I wonder if we might be better off examining them more in the future. Rather than trying to have general database instances put together by IT groups, should we have small, modular appliances that handle various database services and then just write the code and supply the data. For this Friday, let me know what you think:
Would you like to see small, modular data appliances that you connect to storage and then just add data?
Steve Jones
