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What Is Microsoft SQL Server 2008 SP1?

Service Pack 1 (SP1) for SQL Server 2008 is available today for customers. The Service pack is available via download here and is primarily a roll-up of previous cumulative updates, quick fix engineering updates and minor fixes made in response to requests reported through the SQL Server community.  While there are no new features in this service pack, customers running SQL Server 2008 should download and install SP1 to take advantage of the fixes which increase supportability and stability of SQL Server 2008.

Customers have no reason to wait to upgrade to SQL Server 2008 and many are already taking advantage of SQL Server 2008 as a smart IT investment. In fact, there have been over 3 million downloads of SQL Server 2008 since the RTM in August. With this Service pack, Microsoft is introducing 80% fewer changes to customer configurations compared to previous SQL Server Service Pack releases. This remarkable decrease is a testament to a revised product development process and updated servicing strategy that is focused on ease of deployment while keeping customer environments stable.

What Are The Key Improvements in SQL Server 2008 SP1?

With this service pack, Microsoft has made investments to ease deployment and make management of service packs more efficient. Key improvements in SP1 include Slipstream, Service Pack Uninstall and Report Builder 2.0 click-once deployment.

· Slipstream allows administrators to install SQL Server 2008 and Service Pack 1 in a single instance. This decreases the total time for an installation, including a fewer number of reboots thereby increasing productivity and deployment availability.

· Service Pack Uninstall allows administrators to uninstall the service pack separately from the database release.  This feature also improves DBA productivity, reduces the cost of deployment and improves overall supportability

· Report Builder 2.0 Click Once improves the existing SQL Server end-user report authoring application by easing deployment to business users

Call to Action

· To download the SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1, please click here.

· For more information on SQL Server 2008, please click here.

Many times when we are developing the site structure, we are given the options of running different part of the site on either sub domain or sub folder. An example will be:

sub-domain – http://career.microsoft.com

sub-folder – http://www.microsoft.com/career/

As discussed in previous post, search engine view subdomain site as a different site so the work you have done on the sub domain does not directly affect the parent domain as they are viewed as a separate entity.

Thus, I will personally not recommend having a sub domain unless it’s absolutely necessary. I will rather have a sub-folder which basically still sits on your parent domain (http://yourdomain.com/myfolder) thus inherits and contributes to the overall pagerank of your site.

Furthermore, forums and blogging engine these days help to generate a lot more content on your site and you want those content to contribute to your parent site so that you site will appear in the search result page (SERP) of more keywords. (e.g. of your visitor starts talking about “Zune” and generate enough content on Zune, you want your site to appear in the SERP when people search for Zune. However, if we are using sub-domain, only your sub-domain will appear in the SERP and your parent site will not be shown.

Also, search engine algorithms will usually not return all the sub-domain of your site as there is a “two-page limit” for SERP result (thou not always… but it’s a lot harder for you to get more than 2 listings on the same SERP page unless all your subdomain is highly relevant to the keyword).

In conclusion, I will strongly encourage site owner to make use of sub-folders whenever possible. They should only consider a sub-domain if the sub-domain is serves a totally different purpose from the parent site and significant SEO investment into the new site is available as launching a sub-domain is similar to launching a brand new site from scratch.

In SEO, one of the main thing to perform before any activity is to do keyword analysis. Keyword analysis will determine the route you take for future SEO actions and also how you model the type of content you want to publish on your website. The first question a person has to ask himself when doing keyword analysis is:

“What sort of keyword do I visualize someone who doesn’t know of my site typed into search engine and I want them to see my site appearing in the search result page?”

In general, there are a few category of keyword. We shall name them big, small and medium sized keyword. For our case study, we will choose a website such as MIX09 which is a Microsoft event for designers and web developers.

If you are the site owner of MIX09, you will want to do some brainstorming with your team to identify potential keywords which may be related to your site. You can use tools such as mind-maps to identify those potential keyword.

As you can gather from this,

Big Keywords: Generic keyword that most people will search. Such keyword will tend to receive the most amount of traffic and are the hardest to be ranked. They are usually short in length and a lot of your competitors are probably targeting the same keyword. However, these are keyword that are most important.

Medium Sized Keyword: These keyword are an extension of big keywords. They may contain parts of a big keyword + <something else> or they can be a mixture of 2 or more big keyword. They receive moderate amount of traffic and they are most likely targeted by your close competitor so it’s fairly easy to get onto the top ranking of such keyword.

Small Keyword: For small keyword, they are pretty specific keyword that is only relevant to your site. These set of keyword usually gets the least amount of traffic and people who do searches using this type of keyword probably knows what they are searching for.

To generate the list, it will be good to involve as many people as possible even if they are not on your team. It’ll be even better if you have the consumer of your product brainstorm with you on keywords as they have the best knowledge in the type of keyword they use to search your site. Once you are done with the site, you can make use of search engine tools such in the various webmaster center to see the traffic generated from those keyword. Most search engine do provide some data on the trends of the keyword. Simple modification to your keyword will sometime makes a huge difference such as “sport” and “sports”. (Sports received more than 10 times more traffic than Sport in certain countries).

Once you keyword list is out, you start implementing simple SEO changes to your site. You should try as much as possible to capture the traffic from big keyword as they are the main crowd puller and allow potential visitors who doesn’t have knowledge of your site to visit your site because they are searching on the terms you are targeting. That being said, it’s very important to track your Search Engine Result Page (SERP) ranking over a period of time to see if they improves after you implement some SEO fixes to your site. That is being discussed on this post: http://cloudfex.com/cs/blogs/cloud/archive/2009/03/30/start-with-seo-in-mind-to-get-more-traffic-to-your-blog.aspx

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* Valid for a Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist (MCTS), Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP) or Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) exams. Not valid for Academic Exams.

** Terms and Conditions apply

I am giving out the following code: SGADD552

Simply visit http://www.learnandcertify.com/ to redeem your 10% off before April 30th (you can take the exam before May 31st) and also get the free retry option.

Follow up to the blog post I’ve made here: http://cloudfex.com/cs/blogs/cloud/archive/2009/03/30/start-with-seo-in-mind-to-get-more-traffic-to-your-blog.aspx

The blog is started on the 19th March and I’ve been tracking the progress closely for the past 2 weeks. On 24th March, I ran a campaign reaching out to about 200-300 students. Before the campaign, I am getting pretty low traffic especially in terms of unique hit (in most cases, it’s single digit).

The action item of my campaign is for people to click a link in an email which will bring them to my blog – hoping that those people will return to the blog after the initial visit for more content.

After the spike across 3 days when I get near to 500 unique hits, traffic dropped significantly to an average of around 40-50 unique per day with average of around 70-80 page view. I observed that:

• The campaign “primary” action of referring people to the site should be completed by March 27 (3 days after I sent out) as I am very sure students checked their mailbox at least once during the 3 days period
• Thus, it implies that majority of the traffic after that is derived from other sources excluding the campaign
• Comparing pre-campaign to post-campaign period, traffic and unique increased significantly
• It remains in growth trend after gapping up from pre-campaign to post-campaign

This is an interesting finding that running small campaigns over and over again in intervals will not only help boost your traffic (the spike) but will also bring you more visitors in the long run. However, it is important to note that I’ve been posting to my blog very regularly over these period and has started a small exercise on link-building.

March Meet Up Agenda

Date: 8th April 2009 (Wednesday)
Time: 7.00pm to 9.30pm
Venue: 1 Marina Boulevard #22-00, MS Singapore - Level 22 Conference Rm 12
6.30pm: Registration
7.00pm: Session 1 – IPSec & Domain Isolation (Junior/Senior Admin)
7.45pm: Toilet/Stretching Break (No Food/Snacks Provided)
8.00pm: Session 2 – Hyper-V Architecture and Types of VM 
              (Senior Admin)
9.00pm: Home Sweet Home

Session 1: IPSec & Domain Isolation (MVP Pom Figueroa)

Abstract:

With the explosive growth and adoption of pervasive, highly-connected networks, administrators are faced with a potentially paradoxical situation: to provide greater accessibility while maintaining security. Even though more ubiquitous connectivity can yield numerous business benefits—like productivity gains and operational cost savings—it has the potential to introduce new risks to the organization’s networked infrastructure. This can include costly virus attacks, rogue users and devices, and unauthorized access to sensitive information.

A Server and Domain Isolation solution based on Microsoft Windows Internet Protocol security (IPsec) and the Active Directory directory service enables administrators to dynamically segment their Windows environment into more secure and isolated logical networks based on policy and without costly changes to their network infrastructure or applications. This creates an additional layer of policy-driven protection, and helps better protect against costly network attacks, helps prevent unauthorized access to trusted networked resources, achieve regulatory compliance, and reduce operational costs.

Some links for you to read up before coming for this session:

(IPsec ) Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPsec

Understanding IPSEC Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DH1zI8QYi4A

Skill Level: 200-300 (Beginner to Intermediate)

Session 2: Hyper-V Architecture and Discussion (MVP Dennis  Chung)

Abstract:

Virtualization, particularly Server Virtualization, has taken on much attention. Dubbed also as a Green IT initiative, Server Virtualization enables one to save money in many aspects. In this session, you will learn about the various aspects of money savings (but we won't spend much time, done too many times already). We will then jump into the Hyper-V architecture and discuss why Microsoft did the Hyper-V this way.

Dennis will also discuss the real world aspects of Hyper-V and some important information you should know before diving in. Lastly, we will discuss the differentiator where the virtualization hype is at now.

Registration

For registration, please email to swug@mvps.org with the following name and email.

As of 31th March, the 5th coding milestone of .NET Services, a component under Windows Azure.

Specifically, .NET Services M5 includes improved support for web standards such as REST, ATOM, SOAP, and HTTP. Moreover, the .NET Service Bus now includes discoverable and durable queues and routers, which support both SOAP and HTTP. Developers can download the .NET Services SDK today via http://www.azure.com.

.NET Services make developing loosely-coupled on-premises and cloud-based applications easier. .NET Services include a hosted service bus for connecting applications and services across network boundaries, access control for securing applications, and message orchestration. These hosted services allow customers to easily create federated applications that span from on-premises to the cloud.

Key Benefits

• .NET Services connect on-premises, hosted and cloud-based applications to the cloud, and connect disparate groups across network and organizational boundaries by federating data, messages, and workflows.
• .NET Services make it easy for web applications to federate with a variety of identity providers, using a cloud-based service for access control.
• By supporting web standards, web developers, using any programming language, can use .NET Services to connect, collaborate, and create federated applications.
• NET Services support a wide range of Web standards: REST, ATOM, SOAP, and HTTP.

(Detailed features listing can be found at Cloudfex)