Voice of the DBA

Tag: SQLServerCentral

  • Top 5

    I’m back in the top 5 for the first time in a long time. I’ve been spending too much time in the forums lately, avoiding other work, but trying to answer some questions for people and help them out.

    top5

    I used to always be in the top 5, but this year it seems we’ll get a bunch of people that are working on the Question of the Day, and they’ll do a lot in a short period of time. Since those can be 1, 2, or 3 points, they can quickly amass hundreds of points in a 30 day period.

    Still, this is a good reminder to spend some time on other things, like my upcoming presentations.

  • SQL Source Control Webinar

    We had our first public SQL Source Control webinar, on the new product from Red Gate Software, my employer. I MC’d a private one a month or so ago, and sat in on one at SQL Saturday #28, but this was the first public one.

    I think it went well, a minor demo crash, but overall it worked well. However with 150+ attendees the questions came fast and furious. Some dups, but mostly good questions and we ran long trying to answer.

    I couldn’t comment on a lot of them, but we have the transcript, I have sent it to Red Gate, and have them working on answers. Can’t guarantee it will be done tomorrow, but by next week I’ll have answer out.

    If you believe in Source Control, this is a good product. It eases the burden of tracking changes, but doesn’t eliminate them, and there are holes.

    This is a process, however, and I’m not sure it’s fundamentally different, even with the product, from what I wrote about years ago: Version Control Part 1 – Dealing with Code.

  • Syndication on SQLServerCentral

    I have a few people ask about this recently, so I thought I’d blog about it, and maybe get an explanation out there.

    When we started accepting bloggers on SQLServerCentral, it was a challenge to get people to move their blogs. We had some people that just started blogging with us, but others that were already blogging elsewhere. At first I wasn’t sure what to do, but when SQLServerPedia started syndicating bloggers, using feeds, I requested similar functionality for SQLServerCentral.

    We built it, and while it’s a little crude, and we’ve modified things a few times, here’s how it works:

    • You send us a note with
      • Your SQLServerCentral registered email
      • A feed URL
    • You blog in English (sorry, English only)
    • We read the feed and publish your blog on SQLServerCentral.

    The Scary DBA has syndicated his blog, so you can see how the different things look on our site v the source. Some things don’t come across cleanly, and I’m working on getting some of those things fixed.

    Frequency

    We used to read feeds once a day, now we do it once an hour. So if you blog about something, it ought to be on the SQLServerCentral site in under 2 hours. If you think there is an issue, please contact the webmaster.

    Hints

    I use Live Writer to actually publish this blog on Blogspot. It lets me test things, but also gives me a backup of my blog and control over what I write. I think it’s a good idea to own your content, as well as keep a backup of it on your own blog.

    Live Writer is a great piece of software for drafting blogs, scheduling them, working offline, etc. I actually sync my Live Writer folders  across my desktop and laptops. That gives me some additional capabilities to draft stuff on one machine and finish it on another.

    I highly recommend people tag stuff they want to syndicate with a specific tag and then send us the feed of that tag. That allows you to still blog about something that you want to publish, but not syndicate it if you don’t want to. I know some people do this to publish other stuff in other languages, or they mix their personal/career blog and don’t necessarily want to send everything to SSC.

    Setup

    If you want to get setup, send a note to the webmaster at SQLServerCentral.com and we’ll get you syndicated.

  • ASK SQLServerCentral – The New Community Model

    We had an unexpected switch last weekend. My boss decided that we were ready to move from the Stack Exchange (SE) to an alternative, OSQA.net, without informing any of the people that work on the site. Needless to say this wasn’t a seamless transition, but it was fairly smooth. The biggest issues were re-syncing logins and a few changes to the way the site works (and a little lost data, not sure if that’s been recovered).

    An apology was posted, and one was made to the editors as well. I’ve accepted mine, and I hope you accept it as well.

    But why switch?

    We’ve been debating this ever since the new Stack Exchange model was released. We, along with many other people running community sites, including Ask SQL Team, were left in limbo and had no idea if our site would be closed down. Despite the continued “promises” from Joel, Jeff, and other running the Stack Exchange framework, there hasn’t been any level of commitment from them, and we had no idea, if our few thousand users would be just dropped from the framework.

    There are numerous others that have been running SE sites who feel this is more is more of a monetary move by the new investors in SE than some grand plan for a better community. There hasn’t been a great guideline on what is an active site, what level of traffic you’ll need to move from closed to open beta and then to community, and there’s not even any level of guarantee that they’ll keep your community beyond that. The “promise” of SE being for the community morphed once already, and many of us, myself included, felt we could not trust that this would not morph again to better meet their financial goals of their company. After they have added more advertisements to Stack Overflow and other sites, which is fine, but it starts to morph the whole “we are here for the community” message.

    Even though we are a commercial enterprise, we’ve been around a lot longer than Stack Overflow, and I’d like to think we had the trust of the community, and have shown we have their interests at heart. We do listen, and we try to move this site in a direction that makes sense. However we compete with Stack Overflow, and Server Fault, with SQL questions. Having our site, and data on a platform we don’t control might mean that we would be shut down at anytime, or our questions just moved to SO “for the good of the community” (and of course, the good of Stack Overflow Inc.).

    So we searched out alternatives and OSQA.net seemed to be one of the best ones. They had good reviews, they’re open source, and more importantly, their team was much more willing to engage with us, talk to us, offer suggestions and feedback, and even do some development. For the time being we are hosted on their platform, with the idea that improvements, bug fixes, etc. made to their framework will make it’s way to ASK SSC.

    I apologize again for the sudden move, and I hope that we will eventually merge in more of the Stack Exchange style features into our own forums, as well as easily migrate some questions to/from the ASK site to our regular forums.

    I think the Stack Exchange framework was, and is, a fantastic way to facilitate questions and answers on the Internet, merging FAQs and forums in a very powerful way of helping others. I hope it continues to grow, and I’m glad to see some open source style frameworks in existence that will allow people to run their own communities.