Drew Furgiuele knows that in space, no-one can hear your Sev 18 alerts:
Over the last few months, I’ve had a new itch: I wanted to get into the world of high altitude ballooning. The concept is pretty simple: get a balloon and some helium, tie it to a payload, and let it go. The balloon travels a certain height and distance, then bursts, and your payload falls back to earth. That in itself is pretty interesting to me, and it’s not prohibitively expensive: students have done it for a couple hundred dollars. For a few dollars more, you can put a camera on it and take pictures as it travels.
The thing is, I wanted to do more than that. The maker in me wanted to do something special, something no one (to my knowledge) has done before. I not only wanted to launch a balloon and a camera, I wanted to put SQL Server up there, too. So that’s why we’re announcing the High Altitude SQL Server Project (HASSP).
I love it.