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It is a bit late into this new year, being that we're already in the second month, but we are now cycling the Community Promotion Ads for 2017!

What are Community Promotion Ads?

Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that will show up on the main site, in the right sidebar. The purpose of this question is the vetting process. Images of the advertisements are provided, and community voting will enable the advertisements to be shown.

Why do we have Community Promotion Ads?

This is a method for the community to control what gets promoted to visitors on the site. For example, you might promote the following things:

  • the site's twitter account
  • cool events or conferences
  • anything else your community would genuinely be interested in

The goal is for future visitors to find out about the stuff your community deems important. This also serves as a way to promote information and resources that are relevant to your own community's interests, both for those already in the community and those yet to join.

Why do we reset the ads every year?

Some services will maintain usefulness over the years, while other things will wane to allow for new faces to show up. Resetting the ads every year helps accommodate this, and allows old ads that have served their purpose to be cycled out for fresher ads for newer things. This helps keep the material in the ads relevant to not just the subject matter of the community, but to the current status of the community. We reset the ads once a year, every December.

The community promotion ads have no restrictions against reposting an ad from a previous cycle. If a particular service or ad is very valuable to the community and will continue to be so, it is a good idea to repost it. It may be helpful to give it a new face in the process, so as to prevent the imagery of the ad from getting stale after a year of exposure.

How does it work?

The answers you post to this question must conform to the following rules, or they will be ignored.

  1. All answers should be in the exact form of:

    [![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]

   [1]: http://image-url
   [2]: http://clickthrough-url

    Please do not add anything else to the body of the post. If you want to discuss something, do it in the comments.

  2. The question must always be tagged with the magic tag. In addition to enabling the functionality of the advertisements, this tag also pre-fills the answer form with the above required form.

Image requirements

  • The image that you create must be 300 x 250 pixels, or double that if high DPI.
  • Must be hosted through our standard image uploader (imgur)
  • Must be GIF or PNG
  • No animated GIFs
  • Absolute limit on file size of 150 KB
  • If the background of the image is white or partially white, there must be a 1px border (2px if high DPI) surrounding it.

Score Threshold

There is a minimum score threshold an answer must meet (currently 6) before it will be shown on the main site.

You can check out the ads that have met the threshold with basic click stats here.

5 Answers 5

Reset to default
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Plan Explorer - Unrivaled execution plan analysis. Now completely free!

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    This works with just SQL Server and just Microsoft Windows. This is hardly useful to the entire community. I can't even use SQL Server: I have to pay for it. By proxy, this product isn't useful to me unless you're buying me a copy of SQL Server, and Windows. And, even then it's proprietary so you're asking me to trust you.
    – Evan Carroll
    Feb 21, 2017 at 1:45
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    @EvanCarroll: An ad doesn't have to be useful for everyone. Of course, it would be unreasonable to promote a product that only a couple of people would use, but you are perfectly aware that SQL Server is represented by a lot more than two or three people here. And unlike your suggestion this ad isn't promoting a platform, it's promoting a tool (and a decent one, too) for people already working with a specific platform.
    – Andriy M
    Feb 21, 2017 at 9:55
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    Let me address @Evan's thoughtful concerns. First, you don't have to pay for SQL Server. Express Edition works fine for a wide variety of workloads. And you don't even have to pay for Windows - the next version runs on multiple Linux distros. The ad doesn't have to be useful for everyone to be useful for others outside of you. Similarly, your PostgreSQL ad is not useful to me, because I don't have a single environment that is a candidate for wholesale platform change. It still has a right to be here, like mine, if the community decides.
    – Aaron Bertrand Staff
    Feb 21, 2017 at 17:14
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    And finally, the "trust" thing. Presenting an advertisement for something you have no intention of using anyway is not equivalent to demanding your trust - it's not like you have to download the product in order to participate in this community. Do you complain to Google when they show you Uber ads? Oh, and the community has already weighed in on this, anyway. We are a software company and have zero to gain by using this 100% free software for any nefarious purposes you might be theorizing.
    – Aaron Bertrand Staff
    Feb 21, 2017 at 17:16
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Designed to complement DBA.SE, by enabling contributors to share editable database scripts and examples

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  • I don't even know what this does, but it's cross-db and free and that makes it uniquely more valuable than some of these advertisements.
    – Evan Carroll
    Feb 21, 2017 at 2:08
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    @EvanCarroll See the meta Q & A A new fiddle for dba.se
    – Paul White Mod
    Feb 21, 2017 at 10:01
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    @EvanCarroll it's only free if you choose not to donate :p
    – Jack Douglas
    Feb 21, 2017 at 11:24
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Follow us on Twitter!

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  • This is a demonstration post to indicate how this should look when an ad is posted. It also doubles as your twitter ad, but it's up to you if you wish to promote it by voting
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Feb 2, 2017 at 14:16
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Register to attend a free Microsoft SQL Server conference in your area.

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    This is just a reposting of the ad from last year.
    – Erik
    Mar 7, 2017 at 3:29
  • They are rolling out a new logo, though. It's the top half of this - I added the lines, number, city.
    – Aaron Bertrand Staff
    Mar 9, 2017 at 2:23
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    @AaronBertrand I wasn't aware a change was in the works. Do you think that we should use the new logo in the ad? You're clearly more connected to the organization than I am, but it doesn't feel right to me to use a logo that they don't even have on their homepage yet.
    – Erik
    Mar 10, 2017 at 21:13
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World's most advanced open source SQL-compliant enterprise database.

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