It’s nice to learn new things.

For instance at last week’s Adelaide SQL User Group, as part of Dan Grecu’s talk on how he manages his SQL Server infrastructure, he showed a script that uses typeperf.exe. That was new to me, even though it’s been around since at least Windows NT 4.0. It records the values of specified performance counters to the command window or a file.

Then this morning on the bus I was listening to RunAs Radio episode 101, where Alan Sugano mentioned SCSI, SATA and SAS. I’d heard of the first two, but not the third. Fortunately Richard asked Alan to define them. So SAS uses SCSI but rather than having 8 or 16 devices all sharing the same bus, each device is on its own connection, so they don’t have to wait their turn to send or receive data. For this reason it sounds like it’s becoming quite popular, particularly for servers.