ProfessionalSQL

Microsoft has finally stuck an official date for General Availability (GA) of SQL Server 2008 R2. May 6th will be the official release date - if Microsoft holds true to historical trends, MSDN should have it available for download around April 20th (usually at least a few weeks ahead of GA). R2 will mark the first time since SQL Server 6.5 (for reference, I believe that had a March 1996 release date plus or minus a couple of months) that Microsoft has put out a minor release for SQL Server. R2 has an official version of 10.5.

So, this one isn't as new as some of the other TechEd revelations (it was shown off last fall), but Donald Farmer was showing off a bit more of "Project Gemini" in a few sessions. Gemini, for those who are not familiar with it, is a mix of a few technologies that are as much about Excel and SharePoint as they are about SQL Server, but are most associated by SQL Server in the sense that they take Analysis Services engine capability and provide some of it to Excel and, to a smaller degree, SharePoint (mostly in that it enables Gemini based reports to be easily shown and monitored in SharePoint).

So, as I mentioned in a news item, Microsoft has announced plans for a "R2" release of SQL Server 2008 sometime in the first half of next year (CTP to be availabe in the second half of this year). As part of that announcement, they announced a low level event processing engine they are currently calling the Complex Event Processor - or CEP. I wanted to take a quick (very quick for now) look at this new service.

So, today, I was working on a case interview for a new Production DBA position. For those who have no idea what a "Production DBA" is, think of it as a somewhat typical implementation of the DBA (A as in Administrator in this case), only it is supporting database implementations of a specific application suite for a large number of customers (say, 75 of them). The case interview is one where we step outside of specific technical questions, and instead focus on problem solving and analytical skills.

 How does one figure out if someone is a good DBA?

If there's one thing that those of us who have to change Windows settings all the time hate, it's anything that unnecessarily slows us down. Perhaps the pinnacle of this was reached with the release of Vista, as Microsoft added User Account Control to the product. For those of you not familiar with this little pest by name (to be fair, it's probably something smart to have for the average user, but developers aren't average users), it is the source of that nagging little dialog box that pops up in Vista and Windows Server 2008 whever you do so much as think about changing a system setting. You can have two dialogs pop up to warn you about the dangers of changing some setting, but UAC is still going to show up and ask if you really authorized that change.

My apologies that the code for Beginning SQL Server 2008 Programming arriving as late as it did. It is, however, now posted and is downloadable from the Downloads section of the site.

 Rob