Have you ever tried to find a DateFormat or date_format function in SQL Server? Chances are you probably ended up concatenating a bunch of DatePart strings to get the format you are looking for.

Amazon has announced a new pricing tier today for their web services based distributed database engine SimpleDB. They have lowered storage price by 83% ($0.25/gb/month), and added a free usage tier.

Creating hosts file entries allows you to create DNS aliases which can be very handy for web development. If your on a Mac, you will notice that it has the /etc/hosts file just like other unix os's.

One problem I kept running into however was that OS X was caching my host entries.