Editorials

New SelectViews Show, Virtualization vs. Instances

SSWUG.ORG Community Survey – Coming Monday!
On Monday I’ll be including a link to the survey for the SSWUG.ORG community. We need your help determining features and direction for SSWUG.ORG, so if you have a few minutes, I’d sure appreciate your feedback! Keep an eye out for the newsletter Monday…

Work Tamer – One Day IT Pro Events, No Fluff
Three lucky Canadian cities (Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal) will be the sites for these one-day intense events. These are really unique information sessions for IT professionals, covering all sorts of great information from telecommuting to technical topics and much more. Check out the sessions at the site – 18 sessions, 6 time slots! Get more information here at the site, including registration links.

New SelectViews Show Posted
SQL Server 2008 R2 release date, database happenings, using SSIS for more than imports. Also, SharePoint release information and features for 2010, Access and SQL Server and a lot more.
[Watch the Show]

Instances vs. Virtualization – Reader Feedback
Mike
wrote in about the question of Virtualization or Instances for SQL Server – which is your approach.

"How about both – Instances in a virtualized environment. The objective being to have one instance per major application (maintaining their independence) in order to keep the SQL Server installation "portable" to any virtual environment (move instances off to their own virtual environment as necessary over time for performance).

Also works well if desiring only one virtual environment (cost containment) for development, QA, etc while leveraging multiple servers in a production environment."

and John wrote to say:

"I have used both virtualization and instances in DEV and QA environments. I have never used either in production. I would recommend instances over virtualization because of simplicity and performance.

Once SQL Server is installed, adding an instance is almost trivial. I have also found the performance to be significantly better. Although I have not compared the performance on equivalent hardware. The only down side to instances is training developers to refer to the right instance by name or port number."

Featured White Paper(s)
SQL Server Fragmentation Explained
This technical whitepaper will help you understand SQL Server fragmentation and the performance benefits you can gain on your… (read more)