Delivering the Bad News
It’s a Friday, the day governments & companies traditionally deliver bad news. I recived the bad news earlier in the week, but I’m passing it on now:
The Standard is dead.
Let me first say, a couple of authors are right in the middle of finishing up articles. Those will be completed and published and you’ll get paid.
Andy sums up some of the reasons why the Standard failed very nicely in his blog post. I agree with them, if not where the responsibility lies. Andy takes most of it on himself because, well, he’s that kind of guy, may the gods bless him. But, the fact is, I took on the job and just wasn’t prepared for what it would entail. The “editing” part of the job was hard. If you think it’s easy to tell people, “No, we’re not going to make you famous and give you $500,” think again. It was tough. But, actually, that was the easier part of what was needed.
The real difficulties were two-fold. First, pushing the documents through the pipeline. Frankly, that was a pain. Sometimes, I was the bottleneck, sometimes it was other people. But it required a great deal of attention and diligence and I wasn’t always giving it my all. Second, and this is the biggie, it really needed to be marketed, constantly, and widely. It needed to be up in people’s faces, all the time. I needed to be the one pushing that, hard. I blogged about it occasionally and I tweeted about it a few more times, but, here again, I didn’t give it the real attention it needed.
Yeah, I’ve got excuses for the shortcomings, some are valid, some aren’t. I’m not going to bother with them because frankly, they only really matter to me and Andy. Suffice to say, I did the job I could do and it wasn’t adequate.
So, the SQL Server Standard is dead, again. I think that makes it’s third death, depending on how you count them. Who knows, the thing keeps coming back like Dracula in the old Hammer films, we could see it again.
Thanks to everyone who wrote for it. Thank you, the few people who clicked through and logged in to get the chance to read it. Thanks to all the editors and photographers and everyone else involved. Thanks, a lot, for magnificent work as the head technical editor, to Brad McGehee (blog|twitter). Thanks, most of all, to Andy Warren (blog|twitter) for giving me the opportunity. Sorry I dropped the ball on this.
SQL Server Standard: Volume 7, Issue 3
FINALLY!
It’s not like Don Gabor had the article done in January or anything…oh wait. He did have the article done in January. However, it looks like we might be breaking the log jam and we’ll be publishing a number of SQL Server Standard issues.
Anyway, do you want to learn how to talk techie to non-techies? You do? That’s excellent because I’ve got a fantatic article by Don Gabor (blog), just for you. Please go and read it.
SQL Server Standard Volume 7 Issue 1
Kathi Kellenberger‘s fantastic new article is available in the latest issue of SQL Server Standard. There are a lot more articles in the hopper. Keep an eye out for them. We’re providing you with the best writers giving us some of their best stuff. Go and check it out. If you’re not a member of SQL PASS, it’s free to join, and you’ll get access to this article, lots more like it, as well as other stuff.
SQL Server Standard Article Abstracts
I’d really like to publish your article in SQL Server Standard. All I need from you is an abstract, a description of what the article will be. I’ve posted this before, but I’ve never provided examples. So, to get people started, here are a few examples of articles that have been accepted and will be published (shortly I hope).
Here’s a great example from Andy Leonard. It includes a great amount of detail, more than I need to make my decision, but with this much detail, the decision is much easier because I know exactly what this article is likely to look like:
I’m interested in writing an article on SSIS for SQL Server Standard. I’d like to cover ways packages can exchange information at run-time. There are a couple obscure ways parent-child packages interact that make for some interesting design opportunities and architectures – especially when combined. For example, most SSIS developers realize Events “bubble” up through EventHandlers; so that if a Control Flow contains a Sequence Container which contains an Execute SQL Task, an error generated at the Execute SQL Task will raise the tasks’ OnError EventHandler, then the Sequence Container’s OnError EventHandler, and finally the OnError EventHandler of the package. What’s not so well know is: If a package calls another package via the Execute Package Task, the calling package is said to be the parent (or master) package; the called package is the child. In this scenario, events raised in the child at the package level will bubble to the parent package.The second obscure behavior is variables in the parent package are inherited in the child package. The cool thing is: they’re inherited ByRef – unlike parent package configurations, which pass variable values ByVal from parent to child. ByVal is one-way communication; ByRef is bi-directional, which means I can make a change to a variable in the child package and that change will persist in the parent after the child package has completed executing.
It is common knowledge that Application Programmers and DBAs don’t get along in many cases, and the root of this is that the two technologies are fundamentally different. It is also common knowledge that many Application Programmers write SQL as part of their job. However, often their familiarity with loop-based programming is their undoing, taking them down strange SQL paths that produce bad SQL code and make their relationship with the DBAs even worse. This article will show how difficult the transition is, even if it doesn’t seem to be at first, and how you have to adjust your thinking in order to successfully program in T-SQL.
In this article, I will give you a practical overview of how to design effective partitioning schemes. I will cover good partitioning design, the differences between aligned and non-aligned indexes, and some examples of when to use each. I’ll also discuss some issues to be aware of when designing partitioning schemes, including performance, replication, and sliding-window considerations.
SQL Standard Update
Andy Warren in the latest PASS Connector has posted an update on where we’re at with the SQL Server Standard. I’m so happy that Andy has been keeping this out in front of people. It provides some impetus to get the work done. Except for the authors thanks (and they’re receiving $500, so they should say thank you), there’s very little feedback on the Standard to show whether or not people are interested, if the goals and ideas are worthy… In other words, you guys need to let us know what you think about the thing.
Two more articles are in the hopper to be published. Another has gone into copy edit. We’re technical editing two others. That’s five more, so you guys can expect to see another ten weeks worth of SQL Server Standard. But after that…
Don’t you want $500? Just submit an abstract and your writing history to grant.fritchey@sqlpass.org. We’ll get you started.
SQL Server Standard Update
The first article should be out within a week or so (knock wood).
I hav a winner for the contest to help us pick the artwork for the cover. Leo Pasta. Congrats. Get in touch with me at: grantedd -at- gmail.com so that I can send you your prize.
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