OK, so here are the technical questions answered from part 4 of the webcast series. Still 6 more sessions to go. See you on Friday!

Lots of questions in today's MSDN Webcast titled: Indexing Best Practices. And - lots of great resources to continue learning! To allow you to check out a few of the other resources right away, I'm posting this "Resources ONLY" part of the Q&A. Wow, talk about a lot of homework... Enjoy.

And - here's the written Q&A from Part 3 of the MSDN Webcast Series: Effectively Designing a Scalable and Reliable Database, A Primer to Proper SQL Server Database Development. Part 3's focus was "Designing Tables that Scale, Best Practices in Data Types and Initial Table Structures." As for the Q&A, surprisingly, it's delivered before part 4...just barely! Lots of great questions (as usual!) and quite a few links and things to reference. Enjoy!

Most people I know - especially those who don't know a lot about Indexes (but even those who do :) - can't believe that I have a two-day class on NOTHING but Indexing... They ask me, "How can you talk about one topic for two days?" The scary part is my answer...

The SQL Server Magazine's Reader's Choice Awards came out and "A First Look at SQL Server 2005 for Developers" took first place!

This is a PRELIMINARY DRAFT of a whitepaper slated to be released on MSDN. This whitepaper is only a draft and SQLskills/Microsoft make no claims or warranties to the accuracy within (or whatever the disclaimer is supposed to say :). Enjoy!

Well, I thought the first Q&A log was a monster at 4 pages... this one is 11. LOTS of questions in the Aug 12th webcast on Creating an Effective Recovery Strategy. We talked about Recovery Models, Backup Types and Best Practices and you guys had a TON of great questions! I would also suggest reading the chapter for download on the homepage of SQLskills for some additional details about the Environment Basics that Effect Recovery. All of the session links and resources are listed in this blog entry. Enjoy! With all the resource links from this one - you'll be busy till next week (and/or when I get Part 3's questions completed).

OK, I said that I'd post the Q&A from the session...over the weekend and well, it's well past the weekend cause it's Thursday. The next session (Part 2 of 10) is tomorrow and I'll be better posting these Q&As from here. Wow - you guys do ask a lot of questions though... ;)

Wow, I've been horribly bad at blogging these days and I owe you a few entries as well... But, good news, I have a new MSDN Webcast series that will help to answer a lot of best practices in database design strategies that can help you achieve better scalability, availability and reliability. All of my demos are on SQL Server 2005 but many of the concepts apply to both SQL Server 2000 as well as 2005.

The sessions are all targeted at best practices and as such we went with a base of 200 level. Knowing me I can't go through an entire session without some internals and/or technical depth so you should expect 200-300 overall. I'm very excited about this series because everything counts! What I mean is that each and every best practice you implement helps to bring about a more scalable, available and reliable solution - there are no magic bullets only great overall design can achieve these targets!

So, what are we going to talk about in 10 - 90 minute presentations..... a lot!

Here's a link to the first one and as we get rolling, I'll blog a lot more about additional resources, best practices and of course, I'll blog the webcast Q&A as I've done in the past.

Enjoy!

Today, SQLskills proudly annouces an exciting addition to our company... Bob Beauchemin - a database developer and SQL Server 2005 expert in the developer space - joins SQLskills as the Director of Developer Skills. Bob brings a tremendous amount of expertise with him in having worked with computers since 1977 and a variety of databases during this time. In the time that I have known Bob, I have been impressed with both his technical expertise as well as his ability to convey complex topics with clarity. We've got quite a few things in the works and we'll keep you posted of the changes on our blogs and our SQLskills website.

In the interim, make sure to update all of your references for Bob! If you've subscribed to his blog in the past, update your links to his new blog site:

• Bob Beauchemin's blog is now here: http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/bobb
• Bob Beauchemin's RSS Feed is now here: http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/bobb/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss

If you want to read a bit about his past, present and future, check out our AboutBob page here: http://www.sqlskills.com/aboutbob.asp

And, if you're interested in hearing the PodCast he recorded with SQL Down Under host Greg Low, check out: http://www.sqldownunder.com/. The specific downloads for Bob's recordings are here: SDU4FullShow.mp3 or here: SDU4FullShow.wma.

Exciting times indeed. Stay tuned!