SQLCAT stands for SQL Customer Advisory Team. The SQLCAT blog contains amazing posts by Microsoft’s SQL engineers back at Redmond. Reading this blog will give you a lot of intrinsic information about SQL server.
One thing I love reading in particular is the whitepapers released by the team. They contain best practices and real life user scenarios. The steps and settings outlined in these whitepapers are offer deep insights and point to ponder about.
Just reading the abstracts gives be goose bumps, for eg: This white paper explains how Microsoft® adCenter implemented a Microsoft SQL Server® 2008 Analysis ServicesScalable Shared Database on EMC® Symmetrix VMAX™ storage. Leveraging TimeFinder® clones and Enterprise Flash Drives with the read-only feature of SQLServer 2008 Analysis Services allowed adCenter to dramatically scale out OLAP while maintaining SLAs and decreasing system outages. Note that adCentre is what powers the Ads on Bing search.
Do visit the blog and enjoy. Here is a link to a consolidated index of all the SQLCAL whitepapers.
Stanley Johns's Database Blog 