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One of the companies I’m most interested in right now is the EFuel Corporation.  Based in Los Gatos, CA, EFuel produces a home ethanol device called the MicroFueler – the world’s first home ethanol refinery system.  Now you can make ethanol in your own garage and use it to run your car.

A MicroFueler can produce up to 35 gallons of ethanol a week and runs on a standard household AC power supply.  Sugar, yeast and water ferment, and the high tech filtration system efficiently separates out the ethanol.  

But wait, it gets better!  Sierra Nevada Brewery plans to use the MicroFueler to turn discarded beer yeast into fuel for its fleet of biofuel trucks.  Sierra Nevada generates 1.6 million gallons of “bottom of the barrel” beer yeast waste each year, which it now sells to farmers as feed.  But going forward, management plans to use MicroFuelers to run their whole fleet of biofuel trucks.  

Why am I so excited about EFuel?   Well, for one thing DesignMind created the EFuel web site.  (Check out the Video Room.)   We’re also continuing to work on some really interesting software that monitors the efficiency of all the MicroFuelers out in the field, and allows owners to monitor their units using a web-based dashboard.

On June 4th, EFuel will be in Sacramento to launch the MicroFueler with California Governor Schwarzenegger, who’s a leading proponent of renewable energy sources.  So check out the mighty MicroFueler, and the next time you’re ready for a cold beer, go green by drinking a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale!

The Microfueler in Action

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One of the toughest questions I hear from clients is “Our budget is tight, and we need to avoid overspending.  What hardware and software should we buy?”  With myriad hardware, operating system, and database options, making the best purchase recommendations can be daunting.

That’s why I looked forward to getting the latest news about Database Performance Benchmarks on Tuesday night.  Phil Hummel, a Technology Architect at Microsoft spoke to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group about the history of benchmarking, and why it’s such a hot topic in 2009.   Phil writes about SQL Server for the MTC Data Platform Architect Community Blog.   The slide deck from the SQL Server User Group meeting is here. 

According to Phil, the folks at the Transaction Processing Performance Council define representative benchmarks, provide validation auditing, and publish results.  Then it’s up to the rest of us to learn how to read and interpret their research, or to run our own tests.   You can run these benchmarks yourself, and Phil showed a tool for this, Benchmark Factory, from Quest Software.

Phil Hummel of Microsoft

Headquartered in San Francisco, the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) is a non-profit organization founded in 1988 to define transaction processing and database benchmarks and to disseminate objective, verifiable TPC performance data to the industry. While the majority of TPC members are computer system companies, the TPC also has several software (database and operating system) company members, and a few system integrators and market research firms.  Members include AMD, Dell, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, and VMware. 

What’s important for me are the Price/Performance benchmarks.  In these benchmarks, the object is to have the lowest cost per transaction.  Systems that can deliver the most bang for the buck are what we need at DesignMind, and what our clients need as well.  Looking at benchmarks from this perspective, the best result to date is a Dell PowerEdge 2900 delivering 104,492 tpmC, with a total system cost of $62,567 and a Price/tpmC of $0.60.  If you need great value rather than the fastest possible performance, this is great to know.

Each posted benchmark result shown at the TPC site includes an executive summary, plus a “full disclosure report” listing price and part numbers of all the components used, along with the performance achieved.   For example, take a look at the Top Ten TPC-C by Price/Performance.

The benchmarks help us compare systems.  Is that Dell server, in its configuration, faster than a similarly priced and configured server from HP?  If you’re about to make a significant purchase, that would be good to know.   Determining the most advantageous hardware and software configurations is vital information.

I look forward to seeing more database benchmarks for systems running SQL Server 2008 in the near future.  These will help us provide additional guidance to our clients, many of  whom are evaluating their database migration options.

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New productivity tools included with SQL Server 2008, along with those from third parties, make dealing with the database (and application development in general) much easier.

It was standing room only last Wednesday night at the San Francisco SQL Server User Group Meeting.  Joel Champagne, Principal Consultant at Magenic, was on hand to show us some of his favorite SQL Server 2008 features, and to suggest better ways to accomplish many of the tasks SQL Server Developers and DBAs perform frequently in the course of their work.  You can view the slide presentation here. 

The first part of Joel’s talk focused on programmability features in SQL 2008, along with some practical examples of their use.  His favorite 2008 features are MERGE/Table-valued parameters, Geography UDT’s, and SSRS with Report Builder 2.0.  He included source code demos for each of these aspects of SQL Server 2008.

 SQL Server 2008 Programmability Features 

• Table-valued parameters
• MERGE statement
• Geography UDT
• SSRS 2008, with a focus on Report Builder 2.0

Next Joel gave a fast-paced demo of a 3rd party tool he’s been developing called SQL-Hero.  He hates having to do the same things over and over again so he developed a toolset to help him in his everyday development tasks.  It’s evolved over several years into a 0.9 version of a commercial product.

Joel Champagne demos SQL-Hero

Features of SQL-Hero include an Advanced SQL editor, schema change tracking, text comparison, enhanced SQL monitoring, a notification engine, performance testing, a code generator, and more.  SQL-Hero works with SQL Server 2000, 2005, and 2008, including Express Editions.

You can learn more and download the current version of SQL-Hero for free at Joel’s website, www.codexframework.com/SQLHero/Default.aspx.  There’s clearly a lot of value packed into his tool, and it’s definitely worth a look.

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Alex Viera, John Hanson, Mark Ginnebaugh, and Paul Bertucci

We had a full house at last week’s SQL Server 2008 Migration Workshop with 55 folks in attendance. The event was at the Microsoft office in San Francisco where Alex Viera was our host. John Hanson of DesignMind and well-known SQL Server author, and Chief Data Architect at Autodesk, Paul Bertucci led the 3-hour workshop, which included a walk through the steps of a successful migration.

The crowd at the workshop included folks from AXA Rosenberg, Chevron, Clicktime, Intuit, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Opentable.com, Symantec, Shop.com, Sun Maid Growers, UCSF Medical Center, Varian, and Visa.

You can take a look at the slides from John and Paul’s presentations on SlideShare.

• Migrating to SQL Server 2008 (John R. Hanson)
• Migrating to 2008 (Paul Bertucci)

Some of the areas John and Paul covered were:

• How to reduce database costs through consolidation
• Virtualizing servers
• Compressing data
• Allocating resources more effectively
• Effective policy management 

According to Jeff Van Vliet , “the most valuable thing I learned was information on deprecated key words and existence of lists and support from Microsoft on the deprecated items for each new release”.   Also, “I liked the fact that they spent time talking about what also worked in 2005, as most of my clients are still using SQL 2005 (one major client just migrated from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005). If my clients are indicative of average enterprise level clients, they lag by a version or so, typically.”

Microsoft San Francisco, 4-29-09 Migration Workshop

Rick Griest of Systron liked, “the complexity of searching through legacy code looking for all SQL calls. It became obvious that it would be easy to overlook an entire block of calls if they were in an unusual format.  Also, the talk time during intermission was pretty exciting for me and I wouldn’t have minded possibly a little more”.  Rick also suggested that Anchor Steam would be a welcome addition to any future workshops…

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Earlier this week I wrote about why I’m using Twitter.  I really like it to keep up with my friends in the SQL Server world like Brad McGehee.   Nik Kalyani of the DotNetNuke Corporation is also a prolific Tweeter. 

As promised, here’s my post about San Francisco Bay Area digital marketing consultant, Ted Prodromou.  Through his consulting firm, NetBizExpert, Ted helps his clients make their websites and blogs “famous” on the internet using blogging, podcasting, social networking, and best practice search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.  He’s also a big fan of Twitter.  Here’s an excerpt of our chat:

Why are people using Twitter?  

Initially people weren’t very creative and they actually typed in “drinking coffee” or “going to lunch”.  Over time people have become more creative. Now they post links to useful information, ask for help, ask provocative questions and pass along interesting news related to their niche.

What kind of information can I find using Twitter?

You can enter any search term in http://search.twitter.com and find many conversations in progress related to your search term.  People discuss the weather, ask for help with their iPhone, talk about sex and share extremely personal details on Twitter. Can you say “too much information?”

Ted Prodromou

What are some useful Twitter apps?

I use TwitterBerry to Tweet on my Blackberry and TweetDeck on my PC. Some other great apps are:

• TweetStats: Provides detailed usage information about any Twitter user
• Monitter: Let’s you search for Twitter conversations within a certain distance from your location. This lets you find local people that can use your service or product.
• SnapTweet: Lets you Tweet pictures from your Flickr account
• 12seconds.tv: Gives you the ability to tweet 12 second videos you create with your webcam

Do big corporations use Twitter?

Oh, yes definitely.  Corporations are using Twitter for team communication when they work remotely. Companies are also scanning the internet for negative conversations about their products and services and engage the complainers in conversation immediately to solve their problem. Some creative uses by corporations include:

• Comcast provides tech support to customers who are waiting for the tech to arrive.  (Here’s an article in Business Week about it.)
• H&R Block gave away free tax software in Twitter contests then they provided tech support via Twitter
• Intuit gave away free software in Twitter contests and provided tech support
• 800 Dentist engages people that are afraid of the dentist on Twitter

Should small businesses use Twitter? 

Of course small business owners should use Twitter!  By using Monitter they can search for people talking about problems that their product or service can solve.  They can join in the conversation and instantly create a relationship with that person.

What about independent consultants?

They can use it the same way. People use the internet to find solutions to their problems. People share everything on the internet so you can find highly targeted leads for free.

Lastly, I know you attended the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco in March.  Can you mention a few of the more interesting things you learned at the conference?

The internet has been around for a long time and companies are really starting to figure out how to leverage its unlimited potential. Even though we’ve been through Web 1.0 and now Web 2.0 is turning into social media, it all comes back to relationships. People buy from people they know and trust. Web 1.0 was about building static websites that promoted a companies products and services. There was no interaction between the customer and the company.

Today the web is interactive and conversations are everywhere. If you’re not engaging your customers in conversation online you’re missing the boat. It’s funny because we’ve come full circle, back to the days before the internet.

Thanks, Ted!

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