Reading Material: Abstractions, Virtualisation and Cloud

When speaking at conferences, I often get asked questions about virtualization and how fast databases will run on it (and even if they are “supported” on virtualised systems).  This is complex question to answer. Because it requires a very deep understanding of CPU caches, memory and I/O systems to fully describe the tradeoffs.

An Interesting Blog to Follow

I know some of you track Conor Cunningham’s blog, which I highly recommend. The information on query optimizers is rather sparse out there – and it is a real privilege when people who know what they are talking about share their information freely on a blog. There are just not that many of them.

Here is something to think about in that context: Even if you are only interested in SQL Server, there are good things to be learned from studying other database engines – they are after all very similar. One of the good blogs for that purpose is the Oracle optimizer blog: http://blogs.oracle.com/optimizer/. It is delightfully free from marketing, and packed with good stuff. Don’t worry about the fact that they like textual query plans over there in Oracle. You might be used to viewing plans graphically, but I am sure you agree that such minor difference in display preferences can be set aside in the name of reading good material.

Reading Material

Today, I was asked a good question: “What material do you read to stay up to date on SQL Server, computers and data modeling” (thanks Chris). Let me try to answer this: