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:

As I previously mentioned the [story:sqlserver2005-sqliosim-released] earlier
this year. It was a rewrite of SQLIOStress

as Bob Dorr explains it.

Tags: Best Practices, IIS, Software Development, SQL Server, Tools