I’m completely sold on cloud-based collaboration technologies, and I’ve been an avid user of Google Docs for years.  It helps me break down walls between internal and external collaborators.  Right now, as we speak, several of us are editing a Google Docs spreadsheet to vote on the winners of the Best Thing I Learned At PASS contest.  I was able to set up a new document, share it with several people, and get collaboration working without any VPN problems, permissions, file sharing difficulties, you name it.  Presto, any one of several people can edit my spreadsheet.

Now replace “contest results” with “P&L statement”, and start asking questions.

Picture your CFO sharing the P&L results with several high-ranking executives.  Are all the cells locked?  Are you sure?  What happens when someone changes numbers?  How good is your change tracking?  Where did those sales figures come from?  Can you show the family tree for any given cell of data?

When I was a data warehouse administrator, end users constantly came up to me and said, “The data’s wrong in the data warehouse.  This here number on my report can’t possibly be right.”  To troubleshoot it, I had to ask:

• What’s the calculation used to build this number?  Are we sure we’re summing when we’re not supposed to average?
• What’s the SQL query used to get the data?  Are the joins right?  Are the group-bys right?
• Where did the underlying data come from?  Did last night’s ETL bring in some bogus data, or is the data wrong in the source system?

Reports built by end users are troublesome enough, but when data can be shared and edited by anyone under open circumstances, change management gets more challenging.  In the future, us database administrators will need to pay even more attention to how reports are built and where those numbers are coming from, lest we get thrown under the bus for spreadsheet edits by L337CPA.

Wanna know what I’m reading in real time?  Subscribe to my Google Reader shared items RSS feed or my Delicious bookmarks feed.  Whenever I like an item, it’ll show up immediately in these feeds.  Now, on to the links….

SQL Server Links

Understanding MemToLeave – For years, I thought the only SQL Server memory settings that mattered were the minimum memory, maximum memory, AWE/PAE and locking pages in memory.  MemToLeave matters if you’re using third party backup utilities (like LiteSpeed) and it’s been really hard to find good info about it – until now, thanks to Jonathan Kehayias.

Why the DMVS Can’t Replace Traces – Profiler and traces have a bad reputation because they impact performance, and DMVs have a good reputation because they don’t.  Gail Shaw explains why DMVs still aren’t a silver bullet.

Top 10 Connect Items by Votes – Michael Swart talks about the most requested enhancements for SQL Server.  Note that you too can vote on items like this – SQL Server’s features are determined in part by users just like you.  Not you specifically, though, because you haven’t voted yet.  No pressure.

How to Configure TempDB on a Multi-Core Server – Stuart Ainsworth passes on lessons he learned from Microsoft’s support team.  He updated the blog post a couple of times as he got more info from more sources, and this is one of those topics with a lot of room for interpretation.

What Happened to My Fabulous Beverage? – Jason Strate brings kegs and sample T-SQL code together in wonderful harmony.

Tim Ford’s First Contest – he ran a contest asking readers to guess what stunt a vendor tried to pull.  He’s since posted the answer, but first read the comments on the contest post.  I got a huge laugh out of these.

How to Create a Server-Side Trace – Jorge Segarra shows how these run faster than Profiler traces.

Cloud and Virtualization Links

Benchmarking SQL Server 2008 on VMware – wanna know how much of a performance penalty you pay by running SQL Server inside VMware?  The short story is around 14%, and the long story is in the PDF report from VMware.

Scaling Up vs Scaling Out – Jason Massie has just been on fire lately with good technical blogs.  He’s a DBA bigwig at Terremark who sees a lot of big environments, so pay attention.

Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge – Amazon’s giving away cash and AWS credits to the best startup ideas.

SQL Azure name change – the artist formerly known as SQL Data Services is now SQL Azure.  I hope the technical team is doing better long-term planning than the marketing guys.  That is all.

How to Configure EMC PowerPath/VE – this gets you active/active multipathing for VMware vSphere.  (I’m horrified to admit that I still don’t have vSphere 4.0 in my lab yet, and my upcoming vacation isn’t going to help things any.)

New shirt from ThinkGeek

The Junk Drawer

How to Build a Successful Blog – if you only watch one hour-long video on blogging this week, it should be this one by Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek. If you watch more than one hour-long video on blogging, you need to go get a job.

Seattle datacenter fire knocks out lots of sites – I’ll be using this as an example in my disaster recovery presentations. The photo of sysadmins carrying their servers out of the colo facility tells an awesome story.

NNTP is Dead – Jason Massie shows statistics about the rise and fall of Usenet.

The way Matt Mullenweg works – the founder of Wordpress talks about his habits.

“Man, I don’t mean to sound harsh but..you’re an expert DBA? I’m guessing you wouldn’t survive one of my interviews. I only expect the candidates to get 50%. I’ve had them all too. PhDs, Masters in blah-blah-blah, Captain of the Patterns Team at Yale majoring in C#, writing joins since she was in Pampers. Uh huh.”

Answering this requires more than just a comment.

My Dream House Checklist

My Kind of Yard

I use RememberTheMilk to store a lot of stuff, including my list of things that I’m looking for in my dream house. I’m planning long term, baby! It includes things like:

• No ground-level windows – we don’t like people looking in or breaking in.  We like high windows on the ground floor (like 7′ up).  The other floors can have floor to ceiling windows, though.
• On the water, but no nearby vegetation – we hate bugs.  Ideally, there wouldn’t be a plant on the property.  I’m not kidding.
• Within walking distance of at least 2 restaurants – Erika and I really enjoy eating at restaurants.  It’s nice to have other people take care of everything once in a while.  Okay, often.
• Gadget nook in the entryway – I like having my electronic gear near the door so that I can grab it on the way out.  Ideally, I’d have an inset nook in the wall with electric outlets, and the whole thing would be concealed so that wires weren’t dangling all over the place.
• Lots of AC ventilation in the kitchen – we love a really cold house.  I’m talkin’ 65 degrees.  Erika loves to cook, but the kitchen always gets hot, because no house’s AC is ever designed to pump that much cold air into the kitchen while keeping the rest of the house tolerable.  Speaking of which….
• Very powerful but very quiet AC – I don’t want to hear the air conditioning kick on and off, but I want the house at 65, and no, the answer isn’t leaving the air running full blast 24/7.
• Silent garage door openers – I get up early in the morning and I like taking drives.  I hate it when the garage door opener vibrates in a way that you can hear it in the bedroom.  (Yes, there’s a lot of silent items on this list.)

I could go on and on – the checklist has over 20 items on it at the moment.  That doesn’t include my set of tear sheets with all of the interior design features and furnishings we’ve liked over the years, too, or my Delicious bookmarks tagged dreamhouse.

My Current Housing Checklist

My Kind of Price

Back in the real world, since I’m not making seven figures (yet), my housing search checklist is decidedly more utilitarian:

• Washer/dryer connections – I don’t want to go to a community laundry facility.
• Good phone/cable wiring – I need high speed internet access and old building wiring presents problems with that.
• Two parking spots – we’re looking at downtown one-bedroom lofts, and those don’t always come with two spots.
• Low crime rate – I don’t want to have to carry a gun when I walk the dog.

Notice the difference?  Champagne tastes, beer budget.  I can’t go asking about waterfront property with what I’m payin’.  Asking about waterfront property when I can’t afford it doesn’t make me look good – and in fact, my real estate agent is pretty quickly going to start rolling her eyes when I call.  “Here comes this bozo again, asking about waterfront property for fifty large.  What a jerk.”

How This Relates to Database Administrators

If money wasn’t an object, my interview question list would simply be:

• Is your name Paul Randal?

However, money is always an object.  Even when you think money isn’t an object, you have to ask yourself if you would hire one super-expert-senior DBA, or hire two solid but not super-expert DBAs.  My DBA interview questions aren’t designed to separate Paul Randal from the rest – they’re designed for companies who need to find somebody reliable without spending a fortune.

One of my favorite sayings is that there’s two kinds of questions: the ones designed to find out how much the other person knows, and the ones designed to show off how much you know.  Showing off in interviews doesn’t impress the candidate – and in fact, it does the exact opposite.  Humiliating a candidate makes them bitter about your company before you even make them an offer.  If your candidates rarely achieve 50%, then you’ve got a disconnect between your tastes and your budget.

Start asking questions that your candidates might be able to answer.

Otherwise, you’re just showing them you’ve got a lot of DBA-ness.

“Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips…”

Interesting that they used the term x86, not x64.

“…we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year.”

This hardware niche is ripe for the taking because of Microsoft’s frustrating licensing stance on netbooks.  They’ve steadfastly refused to allow netbooks with more than 2gb of memory to be licensed with the versions of Windows enthusiasts really want.  We’re stuck with 2gb of ram and stripped-down operating systems.  If we can’t run the apps we want, then maybe we might tolerate web-only applications.

“For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies.”

We saw how well that worked out for the iPhone.  Apple initially took this stance and was forced to quickly recant, bringing out a full-blown SDK later in order to accommodate the development community.  I won’t tolerate web-only applications on my phone, and my phone is almost always connected to the web.  Why would I tolerate web-only apps on a netbook that I’d like to use on a plane?  Google Gears only goes so far.  How about watching movies or playing music?

“While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.”

Translation: “Android isn’t working out quite the way we wanted.  We’ve already started running into backwards compatibility issues with Android, so it’s time to fork out to a new operating system altogether.”

This should be interesting.  Microsoft’s desktop business is now under intense pressure from both sides.  They’re being attacked on the low (free) end by Linux and now Google, and on the high (cost) end by Apple.  Of course, Microsoft has some time on that low end given that Google took five years to bring GMail out of beta.

• He’d upsized his Access stuff to SQL Server
• Using one database per client
• For 1,600 clients
• With the databases hosted on a USB hard drive
• And he wanted to bring in more data from tables stored in Microsoft Word

She kept her composure much better than I would have, and she never once blurted out, “What the hell were you thinking?!?!”  Congratulations, Donabelle!  Here’s to hoping the rest of your customers this year are brighter than Ted.  And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go bomb the storage depots at Daiquiri.

Start paying attention to more than just “what you do.”

What Ken Block Does

Ken Block is a rally car driver, which means he slides cars around dangerous obstacles at high speed with great precision.  Thing is, though, lots of people can do that.  Standing out in a field of adrenaline junkies means going above and beyond the job description and giving your fans a truly amazing experience.  He recently did a video with James “Captain Slow” May of Top Gear, and it’s quite a watch – even just to hear James May say the phrase “Facetube.”  While watching, it may help to know that May is also a pilot with his own planes, so he may be especially nervous at the thought of sliding sports cars around someone else’s planes.

At about three minutes in, Block slides his Subaru alongside a taxiing airplane.

That’s amazing.

It’s amazing for his car control, but to just see the car control alone is missing the point. It’s impressive not just for how incredibly difficult it is, but also for how entertaining it is.  The whole is more than the sum of its parts, and what Ken Block “does” as a rally car driver is just one small part of this video.  It’s about stunts, it’s about humor, it’s about timing, it’s about moviemaking, and more.  Sure, Ken Block wins trophies, but paying attention to these kinds of details make him money.  People are willing to shell out big bucks when you get every part of the experience right, and I’ll give you an example from my upcoming travels this month.

Molecular Gastronomy: Stunt Cooking

Eggs Benedict at WD-50

The phrase “molecular gastronomy” might sound like food for geeks, but that’s missing the point.  The chefs might be geeks, but you don’t have to be geeky in order to appreciate the food.  Rather, molecular gastronomy is food for people who like to watch stunt car drivers.

On July 29th, I’m going to have a fourteen-course dinner, and one of the courses will be Eggs Benedict.  It’s going to look like the picture shown here.  (Hopefully.)

I know what you’re thinking: “Brent, you’re an idiot.  That’s not Eggs Benedict.”  Exactly – in the same way that what Ken Block is doing isn’t driving.  If you suspend skepticism for a minute and zoom in on that food, you’ll see that it’s chock full of stunts.

Sauce is a liquid.  Liquids, by their very nature, can’t be deep fried, right? You can’t take a lump of mayo, drop it into a deep fryer, and expect anything recognizable to emerge, no matter how thoroughly you coat that lump in bread crumbs.  But see those little cubes in the picture?  That’s deep fried hollandaise sauce.  See the cylindrical column?  Egg yolk.  The razor-thin sheet of something?  That’d be bacon.

Deep frying liquid is a stunt – but that alone doesn’t make good eats.  You have to have a reason to deep fry the liquid, the reason being a final result dish that is somehow in desperate need of deep fried liquid.  Otherwise, you’re not really doing anything more revolutionary than deep fried Twinkies at the state fair.

Like stunt car driving, when it’s done amazingly well, molecular gastronomy is an art involving more than one sense – and Wylie Dufresne does it very well.  Don’t take my word for it – read the WD-50 review by the New York Times.  That place is one of only two restaurants on my bucket list – the other being Paula Deen’s restaurant in Savannah, Georgia.  Hard-core readers will recall that I blogged about visiting The Lady and Sons a couple years ago during a road trip, and this is pretty much a polar opposite experience.

The key word shared between WD-50, The Lady and Sons, and Ken Block’s driving videos is experience, and I’m not talking about the number of years you’ve been punching the clock.

What’s Your User Experience Like?

When someone steps into your cubicle to work with you on a problem, are they scared?  Intimidated?  Pissed off?  Most of us database administrators have ugly, nasty reputations for always saying no and never explaining why.  Think about what that’s like for your customers – and yes, even if people aren’t paying you directly, they’re your customers.

I’ve never given Ken Block a dime, but in a way, I’m his customer, and he’s gone way out of his way to build a killer experience for me.  He’s building a brand that he can sell to advertisers like DC Shoes.  Web sites work the same way, too; in today’s Coding Horror blog entry, Jeff Atwood talks about the business of building a successful web site:

“Despite Benjamin’s well reasoned protests, the source code to Stack Overflow is, in fact, actually, kind of … well, trivial. Although there is starting to be quite a lot of it, as we’ve been beating on this stuff for almost a year now. That doesn’t mean our source code is good, by any means; as usual, we make crappy software, with bugs. But every day, our tiny little three person team of speedy-but-doomed Velociraptors starts out with the same goal. Not to write the best Stack Overflow code possible, but to create the best Stack Overflow experience possible. That’s our mission: make Stack Overflow better, in some small way, than it was the day before. We don’t always succeed, but we try very, very hard not to suck — and more importantly, we keep plugging away at it, day after day.”

Users aren’t giving any money directly to StackOverflow, but Jeff knows he has to build a killer end user experience because that experience pays off in other ways.  Your career has the same goals.  Even though the developers, project managers and end users may not pay your salary, they do have political capital with your boss.  They can make or break your career in an instant.

After years of working with people who want to throw triggers everywhere, people who don’t understand the basics of indexes, people who want their server to run 24/7 for zero cost, and people who call you every weekend for trivial support issues, it’s easy to become cynical and angry.  It’s easy to let yourself slip into growling when you pick up the phone.  Heck, I have to refocus on this all the time – I get frustrated too, despite the shiny-happy-upbeat-please-your-customers stuff I post on the blog.  Building a good end user experience is a never-ending journey.

To be the best at what you do, it’s not enough to just do what you do. Lots of people toil away just like you every day cranking out widgets. The difference is making people want to go out of their way in order to work with you and to watch you work.

Performance Tuning 101 - Add More Spoilers

If you’ve got performance troubles with an application that stores data in SQL Server, and especially if it’s a home-grown application (not a store-bought app), you can get dramatic performance improvements simply by focusing on some basic indexing techniques.  These tips and tricks pay off more than pouring money into hardware that might look good sitting in the datacenter, but doesn’t really make the application significantly faster.

When I go into a shop to speed up an application I’ve never seen before, two of my favorite quick-hits are from the index performance tuning queries from SQLServerPedia:

• Find unused indexes – these are indexes the SQL Server engine says it’s not using.  Unused indexes incur a speed penalty because SQL Server still has to add/update the indexes as records change, so they make writes slower.
• Find missing indexes – these are indexes SQL Server wishes it had available.

I’m not going to cover those in detail this week because I’ve already recorded tutorial videos over at SQLServerPedia for those, but I do want to focus on something these queries won’t pick up.  Sometimes a table has two nearly-identical indexes, and they’re both being used for reads.  Take these two:

CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX_RunID_SiteID_DataSource_OutputType_PeriodType] ON [dbo].[MyTable]
([RunID] ASC,
[SiteID] ASC,
[DataSource] ASC,
[OutputType] ASC,
[PeriodType] ASC
)
 
CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX_RunID_SiteID_DataSource_OutputType_PeriodType_QuotaItemDriverID] ON [dbo].[MyTable]
([RunID] ASC,
[SiteID] ASC,
[DataSource] ASC,
[OutputType] ASC,
[PeriodType] ASC,
[QuotaItemDriverID] ASC,
)

Performance Tuning 201 - Even Wood 2x4s Can Be Spoilers

They’re two different indexes, and they’re both getting used – but does that mean we need them both?

They’re very nearly identical – but the second index has one extra field.  When the SQL Server engine gets a query that needs RunID, SiteID, DataSource, OutputType, and PeriodType – but not QuotaItemDriverID – then it will use the first index.  When it gets a query that needs all six fields, then it’ll use the second index.

In cases like this, I prefer to drop that first index and let the slightly bigger index pick up the slack.  Reading a slightly larger index will take slightly more time: if a query didn’t need that QuotaItemDriverID field, it still has to pull it off the disk in order to perform the query.  However, dropping the index pays off during inserts/updates/deletes, because it’s one less index SQL Server has to manage.  It also makes the database smaller, thereby making database maintenance tasks smaller/faster.

If:

• I have two indexes with the exact same fields in the same order, but
• One has 1-2 extra fields, and
• There aren’t include fields, or the include fields are the same

Then I’ll drop the shorter index with extreme prejudice.

When Indexes Have Include Fields

If they have “include” fields, then I’ll merge the include fields between the two indexes to make one index to serve both needs.  Say we have these two indexes:

CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX_RunID_SiteID_DataSource_OutputType_PeriodType_Includes] ON [dbo].[MyTable]
([RunID] ASC,
[SiteID] ASC,
[DataSource] ASC,
[OutputType] ASC,
[PeriodType] ASC
) INCLUDE ( [YTDRevenue], [MTDRevenue] )
 
CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX_RunID_SiteID_DataSource_OutputType_PeriodType_QuotaItemDriverID_Includes] ON [dbo].[MyTable]([RunID] ASC,
[SiteID] ASC,
[DataSource] ASC,
[OutputType] ASC,
[PeriodType] ASC,
[QuotaItemDriverID] ASC,
) INCLUDE ( [SalespersonID], [MTDRevenue] )

The first index includes the YTDRevenue field, but the second index doesn’t.  If I just drop the first index, then queries that needed that field won’t get the full speed benefits from the second index.  To merge the two indexes, I need to drop both indexes and recreate the second one with the YTDRevenue field included, like this:

CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX_RunID_SiteID_DataSource_OutputType_PeriodType_QuotaItemDriverID_Includes] ON [dbo].[MyTable]([RunID] ASC,
[SiteID] ASC,
[DataSource] ASC,
[OutputType] ASC,
[PeriodType] ASC,
[QuotaItemDriverID] ASC,
) INCLUDE ( [SalespersonID], [MTDRevenue], [YTDRevenue] )

In this example, I tacked the YTDRevenue field on to the end of the include field list.  The order of the included fields doesn’t matter, since SQL Server doesn’t sort by those.

Performance Tuning 301 - Beauty Just Adds Weight

Things to Watch Out For

In my examples, I kept things simple by omitting all of the extra indexing options like partitioning and sorting in TempDB.  When doing index tuning in real life, though, you’ll want to check those options to make sure they’re consistent from index to index.

Field order matters in indexes; if two indexes have the same fields but in different order, that doesn’t mean you can drop one of them.

Ideally, after making index changes, we would restart the SQL Server instance to reset the DMV counters that monitor index use.  In reality, though, that’s not so easy to pull off, so we need to log our changes to understand what the changes have been.  After making index changes, log the changes somewhere. I keep the output of the index performance tuning DMV queries in Excel spreadsheets because it’s easier to email those back and forth from machine to machine, especially when I’m consulting. The next time you do index performance tuning on the same database, you can use the historical spreadsheets to determine whether or not your changes worked the way you’d planned.

The Race Course

Since 1898, sailors have gathered at the Chicago Yacht Club each summer to race their sailboats up Lake Michigan to the Mackinac (pronounced mackinaw) Island.  The 333 mile course from Navy Pier to the lighthouse makes it the longest annual freshwater sailing race in the world.

The sailboats race around the clock for days as the crew work in shifts, sailing for a few hours and then sleeping for a few. Night sailing, storms, and quiet windless calms make this a memorable experience.

I’m nowhere near qualified enough to get a crew position on one of the real race boats, but I tried it in high school aboard a friend’s cruiser.  At the time, cruising sailboats weren’t technically allowed in the race, but bystanders shuffle down to Chicago and start at the same time as the serious racers.  We lived about halfway up Lake Michigan, so we were proud that we even made it down to Chicago for the start.  We made it about halfway back up before calm winds and a problematic engine made us give up.  I still fondly remember steering the boat in the middle of the night, watching the compass and the stars, talking to friends about what we planned to do with the rest of our lives.

The Hannah Frances

This year, I’m honored to be able to give it another shot.  The Chicago Yacht Club started a separate class for cruising boats recently, and I’ll be aboard the Hannah Frances.  Mike Cook’s a good friend of mine, and he tolerates my complete ignorance of how to tie a knot.  (I was a Boy Scout – how come I know absolutely nothing about how to tie lines together?!?)

We have no delusions of winning, but we do have delusions of finishing.  The Hannah Frances is a wonderful boat rigged for easy shorthanded sailing and relaxed self-tacking, but fast, she is not.

We’re hoping to finish the race in under 4 days, but that means a lot more than 4 days of sailing.  We’re leaving in two weeks – Wednesday, July 16th – for a couple/few days of sailing down to the Chicago starting line on Saturday.  Then it’s four days of sailing up Lake Michigan, a day of partying with the other sailors on Mac Island, and then another few days of sailing back to White Lake.  By the end of it all, the crew will be intimately familiar with the boat and with each others’ quirks.  (Mike’s already warned me that if I want to listen to Death Cab for Cutie, I’d better bring headphones.)

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll blog a little about race preparations.  Sailboat racing really is a sport, and it’s harder work than it looks.  For starters, I have to go pick up a Tyvek suit to fend off the black vampire flies.

There are other RSS reader tools too, like Bloglines or Outlook, but I prefer Reader because it works so well from anywhere.  I can catch up on my blogs from my iPhone or from any web browser, and I can share articles with friends with a single mouse click.

I put together a set of quick Google Reader tutorial videos over at SQLServerPedia to show what it is and how I use it.  If you decide to give it a shot, let me know what your Google account email address is so I can subscribe to your shared items too.

Is it okay if the plagiarizer isn’t making money?

No.  Authors work really, really hard to create their original content.  Seeing someone else pass it off as their own, whether there’s a charge or not, reduces the value of our hard work.

If I took the whole content of The Manga Guide to Databases and reproduced it here on my blog, I wouldn’t be making a dime off it.  However, I’d be robbing the author of income.  Even if that author was giving away the work for free, the author might be benefitting in a way that I don’t understand yet, so I need to contact the author before republishing their copyrighted work.

Is it okay if I don’t understand my blog aggregation software?

No.  If you pick up a gun, it’s your responsibility to understand how it works. The first time it accidentally goes off and shoots somebody, you might be able to get away with claiming you didn’t know it was loaded.  After several people complain about gunshot injuries, though, you need to put the gun down.

Just as you can go to a local gun club to learn about firearm safety, you can get help with RSS aggregators too.  Post a message in the product’s support forum, contact other users of the product, or post a message on StackOverflow.  But whatever you do, don’t wave that thing around until you understand what you’re doing.

Shouldn’t the bloggers change their feeds to prevent theft?

Bloggers can choose whether to include the full article or just a few words in the RSS feed.  In my series on how to start a technical blog, I recommend using the full article because readers like it a lot more.  They don’t want to click through to read your full article on your site.  (Personally, I hate the holy hell out of blogs who just include the abstract, and their content has to be insanely good for me to subscribe to one of those kinds of blogs.)

Even if the blogger changes their feed to just include an abstract, it still doesn’t prevent syndication sites from stealing content with screen-scraping techniques.  Then the naysayers would say, “It’s the blogger’s fault for not requiring a username and password in order to read the blog.”

If we have another site pop up like InformationFlash, I’ll probably end up including a copyright note at the bottom of every blog entry.  It’ll say something like, “If you’re not reading this article at BrentOzar.com or SQLServerPedia.com, it was stolen.”  I hate doing that, though, because it looks crappy.  It’s like bolting the TV remote to the nightstand.

Is it okay if end users submit the copyrighted blogs?

No.  When the owner of copyrighted content notifies you that your site has their stuff on it, and they want it taken down, you have to take it down pronto.  YouTube is a good example because people try to upload copyrighted data all the time.  If the original content owner files a DMCA complaint at YouTube, then YouTube acts quickly to take the content down.

Just as a side note – if you try to claim some other user uploaded the copyrighted content, you need to be *very* prepared to show database records and web server access logs to prove the site administrator wasn’t the one uploading content.

How come it’s okay when Digg or DotNetKicks does it?

Because those sites don’t publish the full content of the article.  They show the first few words of the article, and if the reader is interested, they click through to the full content of the article on the blogger’s site.

InformationFlash was showing the entire article, start to finish, without even showing the author’s name.  That isn’t promoting the authors at all.  To make matters worse, InformationFlash had a Google PageRank of a whopping zero – meaning it wasn’t promoting anyone other than itself by stealing content.

Then is it okay if the site promotes the bloggers?

No. When you’re taking copyrighted content from bloggers, you have to get their permission first, period.

Some authors are completely okay with you republishing their work as long as you attribute them appropriately and link back to them.  For example, I’ve told SQL Server Magazine they’re free to use any material from my blog as long as they quote me.  (Part of this is a selfish reason: despite what Compete thinks, I’m pretty sure SQL Server Magazine has more readers than I do.)

Is it okay if it’s not illegal?

Even if you register your domain name anonymously and ignore all incoming emails, sooner or later people are going to figure out your real name.  They’re going to post your name in public along with an explanation of what happened.  That kind of information will turn up in Google searches, and it’ll make for very ugly job interviews and client negotiations down the road.

Besides, don’t you want to be successful?  Your site simply can’t become a success by alienating the very people upon whom your site depends for content.  You can be successful by working with the community and making sure everything is a win-win.  It’s not easy, and it’s not cheap, but it works in the long run.

Stealing is easy and cheap – but the long-term outlook is not so good.