SE Podcast #28 – Brent Ozar

Jeff & Joel are joined this week by Brent Ozar, database wizard who has helped tons of companies (including Stack) with their massive scaling needs.

• The Spanish site is live! It's sort of strange having a site about learning one language be conducted in another. With French we decided to let them try to conduct the whole site in French. It's an experiment!

• Gaming is having a meteoric rise due to Skyrim. Check out the graphs! (Here they are in the show notes!) Skyrim questions have 1.35 million views in ten days, at time of recording. Whoa! Thanks to badp for posting.

• Anyway! Brent Ozar is our special guest today! He is a SQL Server Master. He has a blog. He has a talk about SQL tuning and whether or not you should even do it. He summarizes it for us, and the gang talks about SQL tuning, caching, load sharing. XML shredding. You know. Database stuff.

• At Stack Exchange, and especially with Stack Overflow Careers, we are trying to elevate users and show off how awesome they are.

• Joel's been reading up on all the Wikipedia pages on personality disorders. Most executives, especially at startups, are indistinguishable from people in insane asylums, apparently. Paranoia is a particularly common form of mental illness among executives. This is relevant because people often say they won't send employees to a Stack Overflow event because they'll get poached! (But it's probably true.)

• Feel free to poach Jason Punyon, employers. (Scratch "Punyon" off your Podcast Bingo card.)

• There's a post on the Server Fault blog about why Stack Exchange isn't in the cloud. It's got a nice discussion about the pros and cons of letting somebody else host your stuff, which the gang explores.

• Answering questions on Stack Exchange is about doing a little science to come up with a canonical answer instead of just posting opinions. Jeff measured the range of a remote controlled robot in Battlefield 3 so as to be able to answer this question.

• Jeff experimented with posting a question for someone else on Super User (based on this post)- and it does! Well-written questions get better answers. But we eventually have to teach the person to fish (to write their own well-written question and post it themselves).

• You can find Brent at his website or on Twitter! (Here's his video about how Stack Overflow scales with SQL Server.)

Episode source