Featured Article(s)
Secured your infrastructure? Are your custom applications ready?
Patching and applying infrastructure updates is a common thing. Keep in mind however, that running custom applications in your environment means that pretty much every component that may be used by the custom system needs to be checked to ensure it hasn’t been affected by your changes. This article describes few most common changes that administrators make without realizing the impact on the custom application. This will hopefully help developers to plan for those modifications when architecting their solutions.
SQL Server Books Online… Online.
I don’t know if you’ve used the BOL system for searching, but it can be both frustrating and incredibly informative. This combination can make it a bit maddening – you KNOW what you need is probably there in some form or another, but you don’t know the right way to search it out. Buck Woody wrote about some new tools that let you use Windows Live to search the BOL information – and it’s even filtered to SQL Server 2005 or 2008. Very cool.
Now the web being what it is, readers always have suggestions, right? <g> One suggestion I’d make is that it would be really nice to somehow have longer abstracts for the items found. Perhaps an "expand" button/icon – if they don’t want to show longer abstracts every time, but it would help to see a bit more. I know it’s likely a standard thing with Live search, but since they’re asking for feedback. . .
Take a look, see what you think. Will you use this instead of the workstation-based BOL?
Breaking: Worm Taking Advantage of SQL Server?
I’ve seen a couple of articles that I won’t link to here quite yet because they conflict(!) – it looks like there may be a worm out there that is trying to jump on the heals of the Conficker virus. The difference *may* be that this worm uses SQL Server to help keep track of things – like attack destinations, things like that. Now, the conflicting information is about whether it’s using SQL Server, infects SQL Servers or just is based on past SQL Server exploits for weak passwords. Whichever it is, don’t forget to refresh those passwords and up the sophistication of them if you can. That’s just good policy anyway, let alone if something like this is happening.
SQL Server Show
[Watch] We have some excellent technical guests on the show today – Brian Knight, Matt Masson and Shannon Bray – all talking about what they see in the field, tips and more.
Also Available:
[Watch] Donald Farmer, Jeremy Lowell and Ben Hoelting.
[Watch] Chris Shaw, Daniel Galant, Rachel Appel and Rebecca Isserman
[Watch] Adam Levithan, Vishal Shukla, Sarah Barela and Shannon Callaway.
Featured White Paper(s)
Best Practices in Index Maintenance – Fighting the Silent Performance Killers
Index fragmentation significantly degrades database performance. Unfortunately, neither the SQL Server native tools or in-hou… (read more)