What I'm Reading 28 Nov 2006

Its been a busy few weeks for me and I haven't had as much time to catch up on my reading as I'd have liked. This is the list of things that I have been / trying to read.

• Software Development at Microsoft Observed
  Microsoft Research paper on developers’ typical tools and work habits and their level of satisfaction with them. "The most notable take-away from the data is that developers go to great lengths to create and maintain rich mental models of code and don’t rely on external representations."
• Wild[card] thing, You make my CHAR sing
  Michael Kaplan shows some unexpected behaviour of wildcards with the LIKE predicate. If you work with multilingual data I'd highly recommend reading this.
• Physical Database Storage Design
  Microsoft TechNet article on physical storage design for database admins on configuring SQL Server 2005 for optimal I/O performance and space utilization.
• What do I need to know about SQL Server database engine I/O?
  Bob Dorr of the SQL Escalation Services team has written two whitepapers on the I/O system requirements of SQL Server 2000. There's also an extensive list of links to further articles about SQL Server I/O.
• SQL Server Compact Edition under ASP.net and IIS
  By default you cannot use SQL Server Compact Edition with ASP.Net / IIS. This page explains the reason for this and the override setting to allow using SQLce with ASP.Net.
• SQL Server Hosting Toolkit
  If you publish you databases to a ISP / externally hosted SQL Server, this new tool may be very handy.

Its always good to keep up-to-date and revise best practices recommendations from vendors. Here's my current review list:

• Best Practices for Replication Administration
• Replication Security Best Practices 
• SQL Server Storage Top 10 Best Practices
• Top SQL Server 2005 Performance Issues for OLTP Applications
• Top 10 SQL Server 2005 Performance Issues for Data Warehouse and Reporting Applications
• Database Mirroring Best Practices and Performance Considerations
• Troubleshooting Performance Problems in SQL Server 2005
• SQL Server 2005 Waits and Queues
• TEMPDB Capacity Planning and Concurrency Considerations for Index Create and Rebuild

As I previously mentioned the SQLIOSim Tool Released earlier this year. It was a rewrite of SQLIOStress as Bob Dorr explains it.