Holiday Shopping Guide for the SQL Server Professional

Holiday Shopping Guide for the SQL Server Professional

The holiday shopping season is upon us here in the USA and throughout the world. In the United States, this season officially begins the day after Thanksgiving on what has now become known as Black Friday. The term is a little ironic due to the fact that days denoted as black in history have always been disasters in the financial markets including one notable Black Friday where the gold market collapsed causing the stock market to plunge. The term black is used here as a reference to the accounting term in the black due to the fact that some retailers do as much as 60% of their annual sales on this one day.

Here are some famous black days in financial history:
• Black Monday - October 19, 1987 – the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted more than 22%
• Black Tuesday - October 29, 1929 – the stock market crashed, heralding the start of the Great Depression
• Black Friday - September 24, 1869 – a pair of gold investors atempted to corner the gold market ultimately causing the collapse of the gold market which in turn caused the stock market to plummet

Enough with the history lesson. If you want to learn about the history of the financial markets, there are much better places to learn about it than here and people much better suited to teach it. Here are some tounge-in-cheek holiday shopping tips for the SQL Server professional in your life.

1. Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) - the DBA or BI Developer in your life that manages, develops, or administers a large Data Warehouse will be chomping at the bit to get their hands on this. Say goodbye to nagging performance problems and scalability headaches; hello massively parallel processing architecture!!
2. Enterprise SSD Storage - the big trend in enterprise storage is SSD. If the DBA in your life is not already using SSD drives, it’s not for a lack of desire. In today’s enterprise systems, disk performance is paramount, and moving tempDB or user database log files can give a system an immediate performance boost.
3. SQL Server 2008 MCM reading list - now that the MCM is more accessible, a lot more SQL Server professionals will be trying to earn the status of Certified Master. Here is your chance to help them achieve this prestigious acknowledgement, and I have made it easier for you to get them the books on the official readiness list by compiling the list on Amazon.com as a ListMania list: Official SQL Server 2008 Certified Master Readiness List.
4. Bacon - SQL Server professionals love bacon. It’s one of the universe’s undeniable truths. Nobody knows this more than our friends at ThinkGeek.com. They’ve lined up an array of bacon and bacon related products from bacon candy to bacon candles to bacon salt to bacon hotsauce and beyond. Who wouldn’t salivate over a 4-pack of caffeinated maple-bacon lollipops?
5. VM Host - there was a time when virtualization was nothing more than something that management would threaten us with. Virtual machines were unreliable and lacked the power we needed. Well, as they used to say in the Virginai Slims ads, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” In today’s world, nobody wants a VM host to call their own more than a DBA. Whether your SQL administrator prefers VMWare or Hyper-V, one thing is for sure, he or she wants a VM host that they control and manage themselves to ensure that they are configured correctly and that nobody is over-scheduling their resources.
6. Windows Azure Platform Appliance - another hot trend in computing in general and SQL Server in specific is cloud computing. Unlike most, if not all, of its competitors, Windows/SQL Azure offers its cloud solution as a turn-key product that you can deploy in your own datacenter. Not into sharing the cloud? Deploy your own cloud on your own terms.