Need a huge SQL database for your data project? Here is one for you. Nick Craver and the kind folks at Stack Overflow publish their data export periodically with your questions, answers, comments, user info, and more. It’s available as an XML data dump. Then, Brent Ozar took the data and imported into SQL Server for his teaching performance tuning needs, and generously published it […]
The age-old password rules have changed dramatically over the years and are barely relevant in the modern days, many thanks to the hackers that keep their weapon sharpened when it comes to cracking passwords. Here are a few good readings and materials that summarize very well how to choose a good, strong and secure password in the modern world. How […]
After I manually imported a few hotfixes and optional updates from Microsoft Update Catalog, I noticed that it takes quite times to download from Microsoft website. Is there any way to check the download status so you know when to expect they will be available to be deployed? The bad news is that there is no way to check download status […]
Via Windows Server Blog, This updated guide provides a comprehensive collection of technical articles with practical guidance for IT professionals and server administrators responsible for monitoring and tuning Windows Server 2016 across the most common server workloads and scenarios. With this guidance, administrators can tune server settings in Windows Server 2016 and achieve incremental performance or energy efficiency gains, especially […]
Some of the security updates released on June 13 have been causing quite a bit issues for Outlook, like this and this, for over a week. Finally, Microsoft released the fixes today to end this. But since they are the non-security update that only includes improvements, they were released as optional updates that may not be picked up by WSUS. […]
There are a few ways available to find out what version and edition of SQL Server you are running. SQL Server Management Studio Connect to the server you want to find out, right-click the server instance name and choose Properties. The product line tells what edition of SQL Server this is. It runs SQL Express version in this case. The […]
The network stack does several seemingly impossible things. It does reliable transmission over our unreliable networks, usually without any detectable hiccups. It adapts smoothly to network congestion. It provides addressing to billions of active nodes. It routes packets around damaged network infrastructure, reassembling them in the correct order on the other side even if they arrived out of order. It […]
Spiceworks has a new series called Extreme IT and it has a pretty special topic in May just to honor the military sector and the work IT pros offered in that area. Quite interesting read. Here are some of the highlights: The differences between military and civilian IT In the military, the scale of IT is larger. In the military, the […]