Double Whammy
So there I was, gearing up for a trip to a customer 90 minutes away and my audiobook had just finished. Having listened to Matan Yungman at SQL Pass in Copenhagen, I vaguely remembered him saying something about SQL Server Radio, so I decied to check it out. Turns out they’ve been doing it for a while, and the show length (around 60 minutes) suits me just fine. Matan Yungman and Guy Glantser both work for Madeira SQL Serverices, and are well known speakers in the SQL Server Community. The only problems I’ve found are that they’ve only done 19 shows so far (and I spend A LOT of time in my car :P ) and that they have some issues with sound and mixing levels. This I’m sure will be fixed over time, as it’s not an easy proposition to create and run a podcast.
So, 10 minutes into my journey I fire up epsiode 18, where they speak to Sean McCown of Midnight DBA fame. He’s running a consulting company with his wife Jen, as well as hosting a weekly SQL Server web show called DBAs@Midnight. The subject of the discussion on SQL Server Radio was index maintenance, and more specifically Seans take on it with his script Minion Reindex. Now, I’ve been using Ola Hallengren’s script suite for YEARS and like it very much. It has a few limitations and I’ve done some wrapper scripts around it a few years back, but in all, I find it to be a great solution for most of my clients. I was a bit put off with Sean’s bashing of Ola’s script and I feel personally that he was a bit too harsh. It’s one thing to feel that something is good but I could do better, but it’s something else to say that it’s bad and then do something better. Of course, I’m Swedish and Ola is Swedish, so my countryman defense probably kicked into gear. But I digress. The discussion was exceptionally interesting and I found myself wanting to pull over and download the documentation for the solution then and there. Fast forward to today, I’ve had had the time to download the script and play with it a bit and my first opinion is that it might be the coolest thing since sliced bread, as the saying goes. The granularity is a real gem and the included documentation is excellent. I very much recommend everyone to check out Minion Reindex.
So there you have it - an ordinarily boring drive turned into a double whammy with both SQL Server Radio and Minion Reindex. Eagerly looking forward to both Minion Backup and the upcoming Minion CheckDB.
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