For the last month I’ve been gearing up to talk about some of the new features for SQL 2008. It has a mine of really nice and cool features that not many people have really spoken about. However in this case there is an excellent article on SQL Server indexes and it includes the new 2008 related index features. This is solid fully detailed guide to indexing of SQL server (aka it does not only apply to SQL 2008, even if you are still on SQL2000 it is still worth the read).

Brad’s Sure Guide to Indexes

If you know all that is to know about indexing and just want the SQL 2008 stuff that is towards the end of the article.

It certainly saves me from personally writing this up , and I hope this becomes a growing reference guide for everyone out there. I will add some additional information in some future posts.

Have a read and bookmark away!

Gareth

Its classified as “A Competitive Review of Oracle Real Application Clusters”, this can be found here (http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/9/D/69D1FEA7-5B42-437A-B3BA-A4AD13E34EF6/WhyNotOracleRAC.docx). Unfortunately when ever I read these ‘competitive reviews’ they come across as unbalanced propaganda, regardless if the underlying information is accurate. I’m definitely an advocate of SQL server, but I seriously wonder what the business benefit is of this type of white paper actually is. Its reads to me as Oracle bashing rather than a real review, which is a shame – even if Oracle bashes Microsoft in a similar way.

I would much prefer if the Microsoft team where able to provide a performance grid of how two systems performed against each other with performance and cost values applied to each. Without this it just doesn’t seem balanced, and as such any good points they may be making in the document will be enviably missed or dismissed.

Update June 3: Interestingly I see others have the same opinion – http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jonathan_kehayias/archive/2009/06/02/rant-one-sided-whitepapers.aspx

June 5 – Joe Chang Wrote: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/joe_chang/archive/2009/06/05/microsoft-s-thinking-oracle-rac-think-again-whitepaper.aspx

Have a read and see what you think,

Gareth

Teradata seems to be realizing that a solid net presence is a good thing. As such they have just released the “Teradata Developer Exchange“. The really nice thing is that they have also included the RSS feeds which can be found:

• All content
• Comments
• All Blog content

The RSS feed announcement can be found here

So for all those out there developing, supporting, thinking about Teradata as a platform I recommend subscribing to this site. I hope this becomes a defacto point for all Teradata knowledge.

Gareth