Answering forum questions can now get you cold hard Amazon Gift cards

Tech Target has upped the perks of posting on their IT Knowledge Exchange forum (the same site that hosts my blog). Tech Target recently
MySpace’s failures had next to if not nothing to do with the Microsoft stack or being in LA

If you were on twitter in the last couple of days you may have seen some links to a blog post titled "MySpace's death spiral: insiders say it's due to bets on Los Angeles and Microsoft" in...
Microsoft has made the decision to unleash me on Tech Ed North America

Apparently someone at Microsoft has completely lost their mind. They have signed me up as a speaker for Tech Ed NA 2011. I'll be presenting a session titled 'What's New in Manageability for Microsoft SQL Server Code-Named "Denali"'. This is a 300 level session so it will be full of all sorts...
SQL Backup Compression and Backup Dedup are mortal enemies

If you have a modern tape backup solution you probably have some sort of dedup process in your backup environment. What these deduplication processes do normally is look at the data which is being written to the backup platform and remove duplicate values in order to save space on the tape backup...
Join me Friday morning as I talk SQL Server and Clustering with Keith Combs

Friday morning I'll be joining Keith Combs on the "Talk TechNet" at 9:00am Friday March 25th, 2011. You should register now (sorry about the late notice, I thought I posted about this...
What is faster SAN or DAS (local disk), and most importantly why?

So here's an answer to the great myth of SAN, it isn't always going to be faster than local disk (or DAS, JBOD, etc.). The reason for this is actually pretty straight forward. Local disk is cheap. That's the reason in a nut shell. Let me see if I can't explain in a little more...
DAS, NAS and SAN oh my.

In the server world we have three different kinds of storage available. Today, only two of these can be used with your SQL Server (as long as you want to keep the SQL Server in a supportable configuration). Your three options are Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Network Attached Storage (NAS) and...
Why can’t I just use RAID 10 for everything?

In a perfect work, you would use RAID 10 for everything. However we don't work in the perfect world, we have...
Expanding local storage with minimal downtime

Welcome to the first day of storage week of SQL University. Over the next week, we'll be covering some different topics, at different levels, but hopefully the information is useful to everyone. One of the big reasons that companies pay for storage arrays is that when it comes to expanding...
Sign up for the LA to Phoenix Code Camp bus

Something which was talked about at the last SoCal Code Camp was running a bus from SoCal to Phoenix to help our two communities get to know each other better, and to give speakers and attendees easier access to more events. So along those lines a bus has been setup taking people from SoCal to...