You probably have noticed the small banner across the top of my site recently. I have decided as part of Earth Hour 2010  - March 27, 2010 at 8:30PM EST – that my website will go dark during Earth Hour. On Earth Hour millions of people across the world join together in solidarity for climate change in one simple act, turning of their lights. This simple act shows that we can join together and have a positive impact on the climate.

Ironically, LCD monitors may require more power to generate a black pixel vs a white pixel. A comparison of 27 LCD monitors was done and confirmed that in most instance a small increase in wattage was required to display Blackle vs Google. You can find more information about the comparison performed by Darren Yates.

If you would like to support Earth Hour on your WordPress blog you can get more information about the Earth Hour plugin at Brave New Code. For more information about Earth Hour and how you can show your support in your community you can check out MyEarthHour.org.

Regardless of your personal opinion about global warming, it can not be argued that we can be better stewards of our natural resources and the impact we have on our planet. There are plenty of things within our ability to leave this planet a better place for generations to come.

Today's Lesson

Today, Google announced the launch of goo.gl, its own URL shortening service. It is currently in a “limited” release for users of its Google products such as Feedburner and the Google Toolbar. This was done in concert with Feedburner’s new enhancement called Socialize, which will currently send your feed to the Twitter account you specify. In order for your feed to be socialized in near real-timte they suggest you leverage Feedburners “ping” feature whenever you publish a post. Overall, the Socialize feature of Feedburner is a nice enhancement and I hope that we will see additional services like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn included in the future.

However, the most important feature that was launched today was the URL shortening service.  Why is this so important? Because several URL shortening services have come and gone over the past couple years. With the demise of these services comes the inability to redirect the user from the shortened URL to the target URL, also known as linkrot.  Brent Ozar wrote about his suspicions of using free web services to shorten URLs for this very reason. With Google the chance that your shortened URL will rot is virtually nil given Google’s appetite for data.

While Google has said it will protect users of its URL shortening from malware and phishing it would be nice to see a link preview feature enabled. The current version of TweetDeck (v0.32.1) simply opens your web browser with the resolved goo.gl link while for other services such as bit.ly a preview of the full URL is given in a pop-up window . This is either due to TweetDeck not understanding how to handle goo.gl’s URL preview or because goo.gl has not exposed a URL previewing feature. Google would be doing its users a disservice if a URL previewing feature is not exposed sooner than later.

Finally, how long before the current crop of URL shortening services fade away or are bought by Google. With the adoption of bit.ly as the default URL shortening service by Twitter in 2009 combined with Twitter’s explosive growth in 2009 the loss of bit.ly’s URL resolution over time could be troubling for many.

Will goo.gl become the dominating URL shortening service or do you think services such as bit.ly and ow.ly can survive?

If you are looking for Teradata developer or DBA resources, you are not going to find an equivalent to SQLServerPedia yet. The Teradata developers and DBA’s aren’t found tweeting about join indexes, DBQL, or fallback, nor are they  blogging about multi-value compression, UDFs, or Teradata Active System Management (TASM) on a regular basis. That doesn’t mean the community doesn’t exist you just have to know where to find it and how to engage it.

Finding the pieces...

The TeradataForum

The TeradataForum has been around for over a decade now. However it is not a traditional forum, it is an independently operated, semi-moderated listserv that is maintained by John Hall.  A listserv is a lot like a party line in your Inbox. You can listen in and talk when you feel the need. However, there are some drawbacks in that conversations can’t be easily taken offline as email addresses were stripped before the message goes out on the listserv. The website for the TeradataForum provides a collection of sample threads, archive of threads by year, and the ability to search the listserv via Google. All in all, it is a great resource that has been serving the community well for quite some time.

Teradata Forums

A few years back Teradata established the Teradata Forums, a traditional discussion forum, for Teradata users to congregate and discuss all things Teradata. It currently boasts over 8,000 users discussing over 4,500 topics. The Teradata Forums are a great place for those who would rather not participate in a listserv to engage the Teradata community when they have a problem or to give back to the community when they have a spare minute to answer some questions.

Teradata Developer Exchange

Announced just this summer, the Teradata Developer Exchange is the latest step toward building a stronger community for Teradata developers and DBA’s. Here you will find articles submitting by some of Teradata’s own brightest employees on topics ranging from Priority Scheduler, Statistics, Viewpoint, and UDF development. There is also a forum here as well that allows community members to discuss many of the same topics that are discussed on the Teradata Forums without having to leave the Developer Exchange to ask or answer a question. There is also a section here to download some of the things that may be useful to developers like an Eclipse plug-in or the recently released alpha version of SQL Assistant Java Edition.

TeradataQuestions

TeradataQuestions is the most recent member of the Teradata Community. TeradataQuestions is an independently run forum based on the Stack Overflow Knowledge Exchange. (The best example of this can be seen at StackOverflow.)  StackOverflow has become wildly successful in part because the community not only provides answers to the questions but they have the ability to flag the best answer and also vote on the question or the answers within the question. Participation in the community earns you reputation points and badges. Is there better way to encourage community involvement and self policing than by allowing your input to be voted up or down by your peers?

Get involved

The Teradata developer and DBA community is flourishing. You just have to know where the pieces are and figure out which pieces fit the missing pieces that make up your involvement in the community.  How are you engaging the Teradata developer and DBA community? Let me know in the comments…