Links for 2009.02.12

SQL SERVER

Update Statistics Before or After an Index Rebuild? Colin Stasiuk talks about when you should update stats in relation to rebuilding/reorganizing indexes. I’m not just linking to this because I was the catalyst for his blog post, but because there are some great things in here and I learned a lot from it. Best Practices for installing SQL Server service packs, hotfixes, cumulative updates Beatrice Nicolini put together a great list of best practices for keeping your SQL Server installations up to date. Some of this just came intuitively, some of it I didn’t know until I read this. Index Fragmentation Findings: Part 2, Size Matters Part two of Brent Ozar’s enlightening series on Index Fragmentation. Brent does a great job of explaining index fragmentation, what it means, and why it matters in ways that even the thickest developer turned DBA can understand.

DEVELOPMENT

Build a Silverlight game, win $5,000 I don’t think this needs any more description – make a game, ???, win cash. Thanks to Brian H. Prince for bringing this to everyone’s attention! Things you now know I tagged Rick Kierner in our latest goofy meme and he reciprocated by providing some great advice for developers/DBAs/whatevers on how to enhance their career. Working on a project with Rick really changed the way I looked at a lot of the things I do on a daily basis and I owe him more than he realizes.

GENERAL STUFF

How To Drag Your Butt Through That (Fill In The Blank) Book Aaron Alton gives some motivational hints on how to make it through that tedious [subject goes here] book that you’re currently struggling to get through. Now you can get fit AND get nerdy at the same time! Found Emoticons of the First Two Decades of the 21st Century William Gibson came across this list of electrical plugs somewhere and flipped it around to make some crazy emoticons. My favorite quote from the text is “Sixth row, sixth square from right, is a very bad romantic feeling that nobody will experience until 2012.” Classy Games (Part 2 of 2) For those of you not familiar with it, Something Awful is normally a humor web site that can best be described as “mildly not safe for work”. Normally I wouldn’t link to them (even though I’m pretty sure I have before). Every Friday they run a Photoshop contest. This week it’s a re-imagining of classic video game covers. There are some artistic gems in here.