If you're a programmer, you may have seen a little web site callled StackOverflow.com start showing up in your search results recently when looking for help with programming problems.  This site is a collaborative effort between two well-known programming bloggers: Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky.  What sets it apart (aside from some really good SEO) is that it's a seamless combination of a wikipedia-style site and a digg-style site.  That means that the best stuff rises to the top through voting a la Digg, and if you see something that isn't quite right (and you've earned enough "trust") you can fix it a la Wikipedia.  It's really a powerful combination.

One of the things about the site is that the owners are using a very permissive liscense for the content, and they're standing behind it to the point where they release a monthly dump of the entire database for anyone to use.  Now, normally I wouldn't bring up a programming topic like this on the family blog.  However, I have decided to make use of that data set.  If you look to the left, you'll see a new "StackQL" link in the Navigation section.  That links you to a page that allows anyone to query the database directly (within reason).  Some of those queries are potentially complicated and time consuming.  And it's hosted on the same server as this blog.

So, there you go. I'm posting about it here because it has the potential to impact the availability of this site.  It's not impossible to get a flood of queries there that would temporarily take this blog offline, and I wanted anyone who comes here to know about that.

Update: StackQL has moved to it's own dedicated host on a much faster connetion, so this should no longer be an issue.