Voice of the DBA

Tag: sql server

  • How Many Have I Read?

    I saw this on Facebook, and while I’m not sure of the list, I reproduced it here. I think that an American list might have a few more books, like The Call of the Wild or White Fang on it. It’s definitely a Western survey as the Koran and Torah aren’t listed. No Heinlein, and a modern list might have Ender’s Game on there as well. Perhaps even The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

    Anyway, there are a few on here I think I might tackle, like Of Mice and men.

    Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

    Instructions:

    • Copy this into your NOTES.
    • Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
    • Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
    • Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

    I followed a friend’s note and used Xs. I’ve read 38 of these. Or recall having to read them.

    1.     Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
    2.     The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien     
    3. X  Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
    4. x  Harry Potter series – JK Rowling      
    5. x  To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
    6.     The Bible       
    7. x  Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte      
    8. x  Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell      
    9.     His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (all 3)    
    10. x  Great Expectations – Charles Dickens     
    11.     Little Women – Louisa M Alcott    
    12.     Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy    
    13. x   Catch 22 – Joseph Heller     
    14. x   Complete Works of Shakespeare – I bought this one year in college. I think I read them all, but hard to be sure.    
    15.      Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
    16. x   The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
    17.      Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk    
    18. x   Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger     
    19.      The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger    
    20.      Middlemarch – George Eliot    
    21.      Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell    
    22. x   The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald     
    23.      Bleak House – Charles Dickens    
    24. x   War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy – In progress now, part IV
    25. x   The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams     
    26.      Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh    
    27. x   Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky     
    28. x   Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeckx    
    29. x   Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll     
    30.      The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame    
    31.      Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy    
    32.      David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
    33. x   Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis     
    34.      Emma -Jane Austen    
    35.      Persuasion – Jane Austen
    36. x   The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis     
    37.      The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini    
    38.      Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres    
    39. x   Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
    40. x   Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
    41. x   Animal Farm – George Orwell
    42. x   The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown     
    43.       One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez    
    44. x    A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving     
    45.       The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins    
    46.       Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery    
    47.       Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy    
    48.       The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
    49. x    Lord of the Flies – William Golding     
    50.       Atonement – Ian McEwan    
    51.       Life of Pi – Yann Martel
    52. x    Dune – Frank Herbert     
    53.       Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons    
    54.       Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen    
    55.       A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth    
    56.       The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafonx   
    57.       A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens    
    58. x    Brave New World – Aldous Huxley     
    59.       The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon    
    60.       Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez    
    61.       Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck    
    62.       Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov    
    63.       The Secret History – Donna Tartt    
    64.       The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
    65. x    Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas     
    66.       On The Road – Jack Kerouac    
    67.       Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy    
    68. x    Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding     
    69.       Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdiex   
    70. x    Moby Dick – Herman Melville
    71. x    Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens     
    72. x    Dracula – Bram Stoker     
    73.       The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett    
    74.       Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson    
    75. x    Ulysses – James Joyce 
    76. x    The Inferno – Dante     
    77.       Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome    
    78.       Germinal – Emile Zola    
    79.       Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray    
    80.       Possession – AS Byatt
    81. x    A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens    
    82.       Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell    
    83.       The Color Purple – Alice Walker    
    84.       The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro    
    85.       Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert    
    86.       A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry    
    87. x    Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White     
    88.       The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom    
    89. x    Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle     
    90.       The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton    
    91.       Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad    
    92.       The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery    
    93.       The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks    
    94.       Watership Down – Richard Adams    
    95.       A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole    
    96.       A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute    
    97.       The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas    
    98. x    Hamlet – William Shakespeare
    99. x    Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl     
    100.       Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

  • The Need for New Technology

    Do we need specialized technology for the large scale analysis of data? I read a report (registration required) that talks about the need for specialized technologies to handle the needs and requirements of complex data analysis. As often is the case, this report is written by someone that isn’t very technical, and is likely using information put out by the companies who are building these specialized technologies. However that doesn’t change the fact that the premise if valid.

    Just recently the Parallel Data Warehouse edition of SQL Server was released, providing a specialized, and extremely powerful platform for large scale data warehouses. The release of Powerpivot as well as all the BI enhancements added to SQL Server 2008 R2 mean that you have a diverse platform that isn’t just built as a “transaction stack” processor.

    As technical people should we care if about articles like this? Absolutely we should, since these articles often influence executives who are the ones that might end up signing a purchase order for some other technology.  If management is going to be spending more of the technology budget in your  area, don’t you want to try and influence them to spend the money wisely? That means you ought to understand what is being written and be able to intelligently talk about the choices.

    SQL Server isn’t necessarily the best solution for all environments, and it’s not necessarily even the platform on which you want to build your BI system. However SQL Server has an amazing array of capabilities, and it is a product you should consider.

    Steve Jones

  • Real World SQL Azure

    Worthy of an editorial, but this is a pretty good use-case for why SQL Azure might make sense. This is a business where

    • clients pay by the use of software
    • there needs to be distributed data center access
    • there’s a client application that is distributed
    • usage of versions/databases may scale up or down

    Not everyone is in this type of business, but if you are, then SQL Azure might be worth looking at.

  • Multiple Mirrors

    Up through SQL Server 2008 R2 database mirroring has been limited to a single mirror for each database. While that does work well for many companies, as you become larger and more dependent on your computer systems, there is a need to have multiple mirrors.

    Often someone wants to failover to another database on the same network for capacity reasons if there are minor issues. Moving all clients to a secondary data center is not something you always want to do, especially as the secondary data center might not include the same level of bandwidth and may cost more.

    HADR

    In SQL 11, there is work underway to implement HADR, high availability and disaster recovery, which is an enhanced database mirroring. In this new technology, multiple mirrors are possible, allowing you to have multiple up to date copies of your data in separate locations. These are now called “replicas” and you get up to 4, according to Brent Ozar (HADRON Rocks). I didn’t see that listed, but I’m sure Brent knows more about this stuff than I do.

    The other nice things is that you can failover multiple databases together, which you put in an “availability group” and configure together. This is good since many applications might require multiple databases, and it could be important that all databases move to the same server at the same time.

    Overall this is cool, and I am looking forward to this technology being deployed. Only one replica works in CTP1, so we can’t really see this working, but it could be an amazing edition to your DR strategy in the future. One note is that this is built on Windows clustering, which no longer requires shared storage, but might require Enterprise Edition, so that will limit how widely this is deployed.

    I’ll write more on this later, but the ability to have multiple mirrors, and have multiple databases failover as a group, is something that DBAs should look forward to.