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In my recent post on how MySpace is using SQL Server, I mentioned that the original MySpace.com was built with ColdFusion.  Even though MySpace moved to Microsoft .NET, there’s a very active ColdFusion community, fostered by Adobe.

As luck would have it, I had a chance to spend some time this week with ColdFusion guru Raymond Camden.  He’s co-author of the ColdFusion MX Developer’s Handbook, Mastering ColdFusion MX, and the Adobe ColdFusion 8 Web Application Construction Kit.  Along the way Ray has contributed to roughly a dozen other ColdFusion-related books.  He also runs several technical websites, and blogs at ColdFusionJedi.

Ray was here in the San Francisco Bay Area working with Adobe as they prepare for Adobe MAX 2009.  Ray will be a featured speaker at the conference, which will be held from October 4-7 in Los Angeles.

Our time was spent preparing for, and delivering, a presentation on migrating from Oracle Forms to ColdFusion – something we hope to be doing for an upcoming project.  We are also teaming up with Peter Koletzke, co-author of Oracle Developer Advanced Forms & Reports and Oracle JDeveloper 10g for Forms & PL/SQL Developers.  I’m very excited to have Ray and Peter, leading experts in their respective fields, working with the DesignMind team.

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MySpace.com uses SQL Server in a big way. On Tuesday night MySpace Chief Data Architect Christa Stelzmuller spoke to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group in Mountain View. We had a record turnout. This was a rare opportunity to learn how a high profile company is using SQL Server to manage very large data.  And I mean large – think 130 million active users a month!

It’s pretty well known that MySpace.com started out as a two-tier system. They used ColdFusion on the front-end, and SQL Server at the back-end.  Traffic grew radically, and the technical team scrambled to adapt. Over the years, the technology has matured, but we’re talking about big data, heavy traffic, and continued rapid growth. 

Christa Stelzmuller and me at Microsoft

Now ColdFusion is gone, replaced by C# and ASP.NET. They added a middle tier, and are running mainly on SQL Server 2005, Standard Edition, with a few instances of Enterprise where required.  They have about 4 petabytes of disk space, spread across 17,000+ disks.  You can read more about the specifics in this MySpace Microsoft Case Study.

That volume of data pushes the database hard – and in some cases, beyond what SQL Server can handle out of the box.  Load during replication was so high that they had to write their own replication mechanism.  Likewise for many other processes. The load also impacts the development, testing, release, and backup routines. According to Christa, they literally invented their own processes and tools, as they are in uncharted territory.

Despite continued growth, MySpace is making real technical progress. For instance, when Christa joined the team from Yahoo 2.5 years ago, they were experiencing more than 2 million data integrity errors per day. Now that’s down to about 100,000 per day. My hat goes off to the MySpace engineering team!

The audience was so engaged that an extended Q&A that broke out in the middle of the presentation. Christa fielded dozens of questions, ranging from hardware configurations to backup strategies, and then finished off her presentation. You can check out Christa’s slides here.

Christa will speak to the San Francisco SQL Server User Group on October 14, 2009 when her topic will be Service Dispatcher: The MySpace Implementation of Service Broker, and I expect we’ll see another record turnout.

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Earlier this month Microsoft released the first beta of a new free tool – the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit – that makes it easy to perform SEO analysis on your site and identify and fix issues within it.

Scott Guthrie’s excellent blog tells all about it.  Thanks to E.R. Gilmore at Travis Medical Software for pointing it out to me.   The new SEO Toolkit looks incredibly useful, and at DesignMind we’re starting to test it out on several client websites.  I’ll report back on its effectiveness.  I’ll also try to arrange a demo of this toolkit at an upcoming meeting of the San Francisco .NET User Group.

Scott Guthrie runs the development teams at Microsoft responsible for ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, IIS, and various Visual Studio Tools.

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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger touts the MicroFueler

What a week!  Today I had the chance to go to Sacramento to attend the unveiling of the E-Fuel MicroFueler on the steps of the California Capitol Building.  Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Adams, Secretary of the California EPA, were on hand to make the introductions to a crowd of several hundred.  Entrepreneur and E-Fuel founder Thomas Quinn told us how he became interested in home ethanol production, and why he thinks the Organic Fuel Revolution will change the world.

In the morning I’m heading to E-Fuel’s manufacturing facility in Paso Robles, CA.  There’s a two day workshop for the folks forming E-Fuel’s dealer network.  Representatives from all over the world will be on hand to learn how to maintain the MicroFuelers they’ll be selling.

DesignMind has been working with the E-Fuel team to develop the E-Fuel Global Network.  This network allows the company, it’s dealers, and MicroFueler owners to monitor the health, performance, and real-time status, of every MicroFueler on the planet.  Each unit is equipped with internet connectivity (wired, Wi-Fi, cellular, and satellite), a GPS, and all the telemetry needed to monitor the vital signs as well as the amount and quality of ethanol each unit produces.

At the workshop, we’ll be demonstrating the E-Fuel Global Network for the dealers who will be selling and supporting the product.  This is the culmination of a lot of work by several very talented teams.  We’ll get feedback and more good ideas, and continue to make the network even better.

For the engineers in the crowd, the E-Fuel Global Network is built using Microsoft’s .NET 3.5 Framework, and SQL Server 2008.

Here’s a video of the event with Governor Schwarzenegger, as well as a full transcript of the remarks.

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SQL Server Magazine is reporting that Microsoft has a few announcements and updates that are of particular interest to SQL Server professionals. The highlights are:

• Old code name Kilimanjaro is now officially SQL Server 2008 R2
• Support for 64 logical processers
• Self-service Business Intelligence (BI)
• Utility Data Platform
• Master Data Services
• Low Latency Complex Event Processing
• Cool SQL Server 2008 stats
• A Community Technology Preview  (CTP) will be available later this year (go to this site to register for notifications)

Microsoft plans to ship SQL Server 2008 R2 in 2010, along with Microsoft Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010.  Since they are syncing the release of those products, it seems like SQL Server 2010 might have been a better name, even if it is an incremental release.

Speaking of name changes, a couple of months ago we learned that SharePoint 14 will be called SharePoint 2010.  It’s harder to say than SharePoint 14, but way easier to say than Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007!  I like SharePoint, it’s an important tool at DesignMind, but MOSS 2007 sure doesn’t feel like version 13 going on 14.

You’ll be hearing from about SQL Server 2008 R2 at the San Francisco SQL Server User Group meetings this summer.

SQL Server guru Brad McGehee was at the TechEd conference in Los Angeles when the Microsoft announcement was made.   You can read Brad’s excellent review on his blog, Aloha DBA.

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