Brad Anderson just completed a keynote in Las Vegas at the Microsoft Management Summit 2011 and announced the new name for what was originally called Project Atlanta. Dot da da dah… And the new name is:  System Center Advisor.  You can find much more information at www.SystemCenterAdvisor.com.  The product also goes from a Beta to a Release Candidate with this latest version. Give it a look when you have a minute.

Andy

You can find the latest edition of the SolidQ Journal here that is always good reading but if you register over the next 3 weeks you may be eligible for a prize including: 

One $500 Amazon gift card and 5 $150 gift cards; books from Itzik Ben-Gan, Greg Low, and Erik Veerman/Jay Hackney/Dejan Sarka; and chats with MarkTab and Kevin Boles. 

The deadline for the giveaway is January 7th and you can register for it HERE .  So be a good little boy or girl and maybe Santa will bring you a gift . 

Andrew J. Kelly

I just ran across what I think is a newly published white paper on parallel  processing in SQL Server 2008 R2. The date is October 2010 but this is the first time I have seen it so I am not 100% sure how new it really is. Maybe you have seen it already but if not I recommend taking a look. So far I haven’t had time to read it extensively but from a cursory look it appears to be quite informative and this is one of the areas least understood by a lot of dba’s. It was authored by Don Pinto and Eric Hanson  with a supreme case of technical reviewers as well. So here’s more bedtime reading

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg415714.aspx

Andrew J. Kelly

I know this is off topic and not really in character for me to begin with but here goes. I have recently been going thru a stressful period in my life with the week of PASS probably being the most stressful of my life that I can recall. For one I have recently experienced 3 deaths in my family including my mother. And my wife who was just getting over a bout with cancer that required some pretty extensive reconstructive surgery was diagnosed with another spot the week before PASS. We will know Friday how extensive it is when they operate. On top of that I have just had a series of very stressful events that all seemed to hit at once and for a while it broke me down. Now the intent of sharing this with you is NOT to invoke feelings of sorrow or to elicit  your well wishes. Don’t get me wrong I truly appreciate what I know the community would have to offer and I have already had many friends do just that for which I am very thankful. You see that is the real point of this post. As bad as I felt for a while there are many many more people out there who have it much worse than I do and I need to remember that. It sort of hit me this morning at the gym when I had a great workout.  I was able to up my weights across the board and did 4.5 miles of cardio and I still felt great when I was done. At 49 ears of age I think I can honestly say I am in better shape physically than a good portion of the population (at least here in the states) at half my age or younger even with my pinched nerve. So that got me thinking of the bigger picture and that lead to this post. No matter what you are going thru there is probably someone else going thru worse times and we need to stop and realize there are always things to be thankful for. One of the them for me is the SQL community that I have been part of for so many years now. There are a lot of good people out there of which I am proud to call my friends. Thanks everyone and remember to look up and past the bad times when they come around and enjoy life.

Andy

The schedule for SQL Saturday #48 is now up at http://www.sqlsaturday.com/schedule.aspx?eventid=85 .  There will be a bunch of good speakers and sessions in Columbia, SC. on October 2nd 2010 so check it out.

Microsoft just announced the availability of a utility to allow you to migrate from MySQL to SQL Server. I know I have been asked about this for some time so there should be some happy people out there :). More details can be found here:

                                      MySQL Utility

Happy migrations.

Andrew J. Kelly

There have been a few releases over the last few days for some SQL Server 2008 tools that you may be interested in. The first one is the 2008 R2 Best Practices Analyzer found here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlreleaseservices/archive/2010/06/19/sql-server-2008-r2-best-practices-analyzer-is-now-available.aspx

And the second one is the 2008 R2 update for the developers training kit found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=fffaad6a-0153-4d41-b289-a3ed1d637c0d

Have fun,

Andrew J. Kelly

On June 29th 2010 I will be showing several sessions related to performance tuning for SQL Server and they are the best kind because they are free :).  So mark your calendars. Here is the event info and URL:

June 29, 2010 - 10:00 am - 3:00 pm Eastern

SQL Server is the platform for business. In this day-long free virtual event, well-known SQL Server performance expert Andrew Kelly will provide you with the tools and knowledge you need to stay on top of three key areas related to peak performance in SQL Server. You'll gain a better understanding of which bottlenecks might be affecting your system, along with the knowledge of how to address them once you find them. Together, these three sessions will give you a solid basis from which to start tackling the performance bottlenecks in SQL Server.

Register Here

Hope to see you all there.

Andrew J. Kelly

Solid Quality Mentors