If the national postal service, such as the Royal Mail in the UK, were to go through your letters and throw away all the stuff it considered to be junk instead of delivering it to you, you might be rather pleased until you discovered that it took a too liberal decision about what was junk.

There are some skills which are extensions of your instincts, and which you can only learn though years of experience. Matt Simmons has this brought home by the fact that he was recently minutes away from a data-loss disaster, and he doesn't quite know how he prevented it.

Ben Lye uncovered a memory leak in the nonpaged pool which was crashing his servers with disquieting regularity. Luckily it was relatively easy to troubleshoot, and he's sharing the tools and techniques he used to get his servers back on track in double-quick time.

Microsoft has announced the official release date of SharePoint 2010. They have plugged some significant functionality gaps that exist in WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007. Lets get real for a second though as there is a significant investment involved in moving to SharePoint 2010: 

Office Communications Server, which provides integrated voice, conferencing, IM, and telephony, is one of those products that are difficult to explain in simple terms. It takes a brave man to take on the task, and to provide a simple guide to installing it: Luckily for us, Johan is that man. In the first of a series, he explains what it is, how it benefits your enterprise, and how to make it happen.

Derek is judged by a jury of his peers.

Cluster continuous replication (CCR) uses log shipping and failover to provide a more resilient email system with faster recovery. Once it is installed, a clustered server requires different management routines. These are done either with a GUI tool, The Failover Cluster Management Console, or the Exchange Management Shell. You can use Powershell as well for some tasks. Confused? Not for long, since Brien Posey is once more here to help.

In the second part of Phil's series of articles on finding stuff (such as objects, scripts, entities, metadata) in SQL Server, he offers some scripts that should be handy for the developer faced with tracking down problem areas and potential weaknesses in a database.

Even an experienced DBA finds it safer to double-check that all the tasks have been done, and in the right order. Buck Woody continues his series with another handy checklist, army-style.

With Clojure soon to be ported to the .NET framework, as ClojureCLR, we felt that the time had come to see what the fuss was all about amongst the Java Geeks. We sent Richard Morris to find out from the creator of Clojure, Rich Hickey.