It's been a while since I did a Where In The World Are Paul and Kimberly blog post, so here's one from a trip we did at home yesterday. We took the Bainbridge Island ferry across Puget Sound and toured the area around Sequim, WA to see the lavender farms and coastal scenery. Here's an example shot of the two-tone lavender fields at Purple Haze lavender farm.

I've uploaded the whole album to Facebook - check it out at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2031434&id=1293146061&l=b050bc54c9 - no login required.

Enjoy!

The SQLCAT team has published a very detailed (and very long) whitepaper on implementing failover clustering with SQL Server 2008. There are some major differences from 2000 and 2005 related to setup and SP/CU installs so this is worth reading even if you're experienced with 2005 failover clusters.

You can download it from http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/9/D/69D1FEA7-5B42-437A-B3BA-A4AD13E34EF6/SQLServer2008FailoverCluster.docx and the link's on our whitepapers page.

(And yes, we're still on vacation until the end of July - no real blogging/Twittering)

A new whitepaper has been published that comprehensively covers the Resource Governor feature of SQL Server 2008, written by fellow MVP Aaron Bertrand and SQL PM Boris Baryshnikov. I read through this a while back (but didn't have the bandwidth to do a full technical review) and it's an excellent whitepaper with lots of code examples and in-depth explanations.

Check it out at http://download.microsoft.com/download/D/B/D/DBDE7972-1EB9-470A-BA18-58849DB3EB3B/ResourceGov.docx.

The August edition of TechNet Magazine is available on the web now and has the latest installment of my regular SQL Q&A column.

This month's topics are:

• Proactive page checksum failure detection
• Why GUIDs make for bad clustered index keys 
• Possible problems using a log shipping secondary for reporting 
• Recovery model choice for log size management

Check it out at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd776512.aspx.

Kimberly and I will be teaching a week-long public Immersion Event in Dublin, September 21-25, in partnership with our good friends at Prodata and Microsoft Ireland.

The class will cover:

• Day 1: SQL Server Internals (On-disk structures, index internals, logging, recovery, transaction log architecture)
• Day 2: Designing for Performance (data types, table and index partitioning)
• Day 3: Indexing for Performance (Access patterns, covering, INCLUDE, indexing strategies)
• Day 4: Essential Database Maintenance (data and log files, tempdb, index and statistics maintenance, backup and restore)
• Day 5.1: Essential Database Maintenance (consistency checking and disaster recovery)
• Day 5.2: SQL Consolidation and Virtualization

This is going to be a great workshop where we combine the best of all our various classes into a superb learning opportunity.

Checkout the registration site for more in-depth details about the content, location, and cost.

Hope to see you there!

This isn't a SQL Server blog post so doesn't count against my vacation.

Just finished making the Lego model of the original Death Star that I got for Christmas. Took me about 24 hours altogether. Click the photo for a larger version.

No need to grow up when there's Lego to play with :-)

Well - the first half of the year is over and it's been a pretty busy time for Kimberly and I. I only managed to get one day at home in June but I'm at home for whole month of July, and this year I'm taking a proper break. I'm going to be essentially dark through July - no blogging, no Twitter, no forums or newsgroups - so don't expect to hear from me until August.

Hope you have a great summer, and Happy July 4th for those in the US.

Cheers