Consolidating links and resources
For a long time, I have been seeing the same SQL Server questions and topics come up over and over again on Stack Overflow and Database Administrators. Two decades ago, I started blogging to reduce the amount of work I was doing to help guide users to the right solutions (except, back then, it wasn't Stack Exchange, it was newsgroups and the occasional mailing list). Anyway, not much has changed. I've written a lot of content to avoid repeating the same long-winded answers time and again and, over time, this made it more tedious to track down links to authoritative or canonical posts about a specific topic.
I took a little break from Q & A this year. When I got back into it more recently, I discovered I was once again scrambling to assemble the right (and most current) links for, say, advising people to stay away from MERGE
. So, I made some landing pages here, with simple and easy-to-remember URLs, presenting (and sometimes explaining) a small set of links to further reading on the topic. So far, these are the landing pages I've put together:
Can't remember sqlblog.org/split
? No problem. If you can remember sqlblog.org
, it's going to be pinned to the home page.
Personally, I use a program called Unclutter on my Mac as an effectively infinite clipboard, and have the URLs stored there permanently, even though I doubt I'll ever forget any of these ones. If you find you're searching for a URL more than once, it might be handy to use some kind of productivity app.