Voice of the DBA

Tag: blogging

  • The Twelve Days of (SQL) Christmas

    Once upon a time a group of twelve bloggers agreed to each pick a post (or posts)  they found interesting from the previous year, blog about them, comment, and call attention to them. I was tapped to summarize things, and here we go.

    On the twelfth day of Christmas Stuart gave to me, the ghosts of SQL Christmas past, present, and future to read. (A few posts that remind us blogging is a great way to save code)

    On the eleventh day of Christmas Mike Walsh gave to me, a post that I’d like to read to thee. (It’s a great one, well written, and enjoyable on backups)

    On the tenth day of Christmas Chrys Manson gave to me, a reason the transaction log we need… (OK, a bad rhyme, but a great look at why the log is required)

    On the ninth day of Christmas Kendra Little gave to me, a deep dive into locks that we can’t see (a look at shared locks, or those missing locks)

    On the eighth day of Christmas Karen Lopez gave to me, the rules of design that so many don’t seem to read (over normalization, is it possible?)

    On the seventh day of Christmas Yanni Robel gave to us, a reminder of all changes we must not trust (production needs to be controlled)

    On the sixth day of Christmas Tim Ford gave to me, the advice that I need to learn to heed. (listening is a skill we can all improve)

    On the fifth day of Christmas Erin Stellato gave to me, a series that teaches parallels in threes. (a great series on parallelism from Adam Machanic)

    On the fourth day of Christmas Andy Leonard gave to me, a look forward to what SSIS really needs. (Denali SSIS parameters)

    On the third day of Christmas Dave Stein gave to us, a post that covers SSIS over lunch. (Todd McDermid looks at SSIS)

    On the second day of Christmas Grant Fritchey gave to me, a way to execute Powershell from the lee. (remoting with Powershell)

    On the first day of Christmas Jeremiah Peschka gave to me, a way to find a table lost at sea (or in this case, you’ve deleted it).

    It has been a wonderful year for blogging, speaking, and the general sharing of information with others. The SQL community seems to be unlike any other technical community, much more willing to share, help, and work with each other in a way that reminds me of an extended family. It is wonderful to be a part of this community, and I look forward to an even great 2011.

    Happy Holidays and don’t forget to set some goals for the next year, and maybe become a part of the 12 days in 2011.

  • Cleaning Up Blogs

    I highly encourage people to blog. I know that not everyone is a writer, but I think that blogging helps build some extremely valuable skills: communication skills. We all need them, and they help us in our careers, no matter what your job.

    At SQLServerCentral, we’ve had a blog section for a number of years. We took the open source Blog.Text project from Microsoft originally, and then migrated to the free Community Server software. At some point we upgraded to a real license, and it’s worked OK. I wouldn’t say I think this is a great use of Community Server, especially as it’s embedded in the rest of the SSC site.

    However, our license is limited to 100 blogs. We have debated on an upgrade, but the Community Server people have been reluctant to increase our blog license without increasing the forums, photos, etc. and they want a fairly significant 5 figure price tag. I’m not sure it’s worth it to us, especially as blogs don’t generate a lot of traffic.

    I still get requests for blogs, and for the most part we are syndicating blogs from people and just displaying the posts from other sites. I suggest to everyone as I don’t have a good backup/export system and most of the main blog platforms (blogger, wordpress, etc) have this built in.

    As I needed to add a new one, I removed a few blogs today. I went through the list and checked a few of the blogs, and found a number that had never had a post. So I removed them to make space and keep us at 100 blogs.

    I hate to remove the change for blogging from people, but if someone is not blogging at all, then I need the space for now. I’m hoping that we’ll consider moving to a new platform, but like everything else, it’s a question of resources to integrate something else like WordPress into our site, or write our own software.

  • Another Plagiarizer

    I received a note today about someone else that is plagiarizing content from SQLServerCentral. It’s a blog on Windows Live Spaces by 岩松 in Peking. I won’t link it here, since it’s not important.

    There are any number of articles copied, with no attribution listed whatsoever. This person is from Peking, and lists their occupation as SE, which I am guessing is software engineer.

    I did try to contact them, as I usually do, but their privacy settings prevented me. So I sent a copyright violation to MSN.

    I read Brent Ozar’s post yesterday on plagiarism, and I somewhat agree, somewhat not. On one hand I get that cultures view this stuff differently, and laws are viewed/enforced differently. However leaving aside all the legal stuff, what about this:

    Do you ever feel that it’s moral for you to take credit for someone else’s work?

    I can’t imagine any culture supporting this. Does anyone want to tell their kids they can copy someone else’s work so they don’t have to learn in school? If your neighbor’s kid cut someone’s grass or performed a chore, would you send your kid out to the person’s house to get paid and take credit for the work?

    I don’t think most people would. But that’s what they’re doing when there’s no attribution or credit. I get that you might want to “share” information, but why not link back to the first site? At the very least it would raise both your search engine ratings and spread the information further.

    Why else would you blog? To get a job? That’s immoral. You’re implying you know how to a) do the task and b) communicate well. At least one of which you haven’t done, and you’re deceiving the person reading it.

    Make money from Google ads? Again, you’re implying you deserve the results from work you didn’t create.

    There’s no good excuse for re-posting someone else’s work and saying that you deserve credit for it. At least Cook’s Source gave people credit, and just violated copyright law.

  • Technical People Should Blog

    I ran across a great blog titled: Post 300 or why all developers should be blogging. The reasons given in the articles are great, and I think they apply to all technical people.

    You will learn by blogging, and you will keep stuff in a place that you can go back and review it, in addition to giving you something to impress interviewers. There is one more big reason, however.

    You need to communicate.

    I don’t think I’ve ever seen a position that didn’t require some type of communication skills. You might not need to get up in front of a group and express things (or you might), but almost everyone needs to document things or communicate through an electronic written medium. It could be email, IM, texting, some forum system, or anything else. However you need to communicate.

    The more you build these skills, the better off you will be. There are definitely some very talented people that can get away with poor social skills and poor written skills, but that’s not most of us. Most of us need to communicate effectively.

    To me, blogging is like typing. A developer that hunts and pecks with two fingers is not likely a good developer. And certainly they’re not an efficient developer.

    The same thing comes from communicating. You need to practice it to get better at it. You don’t need to write as much as me, or write as long a posts as I do, but by writing regularly, you’ll learn to better express yourself.

    (cross posted to The Modern Resume)