The Ashdar Partners Blog

A new version of SQL Server is almost upon us and Microsoft is having an online "launch event" on March 7th.  Go here to register . Question: Why can't I use my LiveID to register?

This blog post mentions some of the most interesting articles that I have read recently, with a little bit of my commentary on each article.   I read  this  article on pricing in the virtualization market. Everyone I speak to about virtualization scoffs at Hyper-V when comparing it to VMWare. But, here's the thing: SQL Server took a healthy chunk of the RDMS space away from Oracle and DB/2 even though those products were arguably "better". Can Microsoft win a portion of the virtualization market with Hyper-V even though VMWare may have a better product? IT decisions seem to always boil down to price and familiarity, in some combination. Hyper-V is easy to get onto a Windows server and people have been grumbling about VMWare pricing lately. I read  this  very well written article on Microsoft Word versus Evernote (and versus a bunch of other things) by a person who spends a lot of time writing. I'm not a guru-level genius with Word, but I first used Word...

This is a short collection of articles that I have found particularly interesting in the last few weeks. This   article discusses benchmark scaling as the number of cores continues to grow on servers.  This article discusses Etsy's growing pains. It states something that I've felt for a long, long time--"If you are doing something clever, it's probably wrong." This (old) article discusses discipline in software development. It has me thinking that I should read McConnell's Code Complete again. I know I've boxed, moved and unboxed my copy several times in the last 10 years and it seems that there is a second edition.Tempus fugit.   This article discusses refactoring tables with no downtime. This isn't for every database. There is a good deal of work here (in terms of development, testing and DBA work) that you would not need to do in a 8x5 environment, when you can easily take the database offline for a while to do a migration or upgrade....