Peter DeBetta recently tagged me in what is called "blog tag". When I described it to Mary, she named it "blog chain letter" and said I should ignore it. But it got me thinking. Although I run my mouth often and have some fairly weird stories, here's 5 things you may not know about me. But then again, you might...

1. I attended the first home game of the New York Mets baseball team on a Friday at the Polo Grounds in 1962. My dad took me when I was 8. It was, as Casey Stengel would say, amazing, when they shocked everyone by winning it all in 1969. I'm waiting for the Seattle Mariners to do the same today.

2. I have a degree in Chemistry, rather than Computer Science. In fact, I dropped the only CS course I took in college, because I didn't have enough time in the day for labs. The labs consisted of waiting in (a fairly long) line to punch lab assignment programs onto cards, with a limit of 15 cards at a time. I was taking six other courses that semester...

3. I worked on the first commercial implementation of Kerberos that I'm aware of. In 1992, I joined a startup called Open Computing Security Group (OCSG). We put out Kerberos implementations for almost every variant of Unix and for IBM mainframe, as well as clients for Macintosh and Windows 3.1. Really. The company is now known as Cybersafe.  My first port was NeXT OS 1.0 (which is just BSD 4.4 Unix over a Mach kernal + GUI). Our biggest competitor at the time was Cygnus support, who compiled, packaged, and sold support for the open Project Athena code. I never forgot their slogan "We make free software affordable". IBM had (in addition to RACF) a competing security system called CryptoKnight.

4. In 30 years in this business, I've only carried an on-call pager or cell phone for a total of 2 months. Not that I was never "on call", I WAS on call for YEARS. In the pre-pager days you just had to tell the operations folks where to find you at all times.

5. I wrote the first (that I'm aware of) class on ASP (ASP classic, not ASP.NET) in the alpha2 or beta1 days of it. It was for an internal Microsoft gig. Just to provide some time reference, the day before I taught this class, I attended a pre-release seminar on Active Directory Version 1.0. Teaching across the hall during the class was a guy named Don Box, who I'd never heard of, teaching COM.

I'll do everyone I know I favor, and not "tag" anyone. Cheers.

The companion whitepaper to my "Planning, Implementing, and Administering Scaleout Solutions with SQL Server 2005" whitepaper (see yesterday's post) is available. This whitepaper is called "Internals, Troubleshooting, and Best Practices for use of Scaleout Technologies in SQL Server 2005", with as much about internals as I could cram in 50 pages. Again, I don't have the "main" link; the direct link is here. Enjoy.

I've been working on some whitepapers on scaleout technologies in SQL Server 2005. The first whitepaper is now available; I don't have the main link, but here is the direct link to the doc file on the Microsoft download site. The whitepaper is about the implementation steps when using scaleout technologies like Service Broker, Scalable Shared Database, Query Notiifcations, and Peer-to-Peer Replication and how to choose which technology or combination of technologies is the best fit.

It will be followed by a companion whitepaper about internals and troubleshooting of these same scaleout technologies. I'll let you know when that one's available. Hope you find them useful.

Michael Rys (and who would know better/sooner about this) just announced on his blog that XQuery 1.0 and associated specs (including XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0) are now official W3C recommendations. Congratulations to the working group on this. The specification process is also underway for a standard XQuery Update Facility and XQuery/XPath Full-Text query facility. The specs are available on the W3C website.

I'll have to revisit/reread the specs, now that they are finalized. The one that always seem to cause the most controversy in classes that I've taught has been the XQuery 1.0/XPath 2.0 Data Model, which is based on sequences, rather than being a document object model, Infoset, or Post Schema Validation Infoset, or a description of the serialized form of XML (Extensible Markup Language (XML) spec). The inclusion of both nodes and atomic values is usually a bit disconcerting, and I get comments like "that's not XML" when people see it. Although SQL Server 2005's XML data type doesn't exactly follow the XQuery 1.0/XPath 2.0 Data Model, rumor has it that the next version of the ISO/ANSI SQL spec (SQL2007?) may have some something to say about this, as well as something to say about XQuery in general. Right now, the SQL2003 spec doesn't specify a query language.

It will also be interesting to see what the SQL Server folks do with regards to updates to support the new specs in the next release, and support of a larger portion of the language constructs. Also, it would be interesting to see support for sequences in other XML specs and/or client and middle-tier APIs. So that "other folks" can read the results...

The SQL Server 2005 Integration Services team has posted a draft of my SSIS Connectivity Whitepaper on their connectivity wiki at http://ssis.wik.is (note the change in the address of the wiki site). It addresses the details of using OLE DB, ADO.NET, and others with SSIS and the database/data source of your choice. Check it out.

If you've had success (or issues) with using SSIS and any type of data, I'd like to hear about it.

Enjoy...