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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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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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Indian Motorcycle site - created with DNN

A few days ago I met with Nik Kalyani and Shuan Walker, co-founders of the DotNetNuke Corporation, to learn more about where the company and product line are heading. DNN (DotNetNuke) is the most popular open source application framework for the Microsoft .NET platform. The DotNetNuke Corporation was formed in 2006, dedicated the ongoing stewardship and management of the DotNetNuke project. 

The company received Series A funding last Fall.  With the influx of cash, they are hard at work creating a development and support organization.  They have pledged quarterly releases of the Community and Professional Edition.  And now there’s a DotNetNuke Professional Edition version.

DNN (DotNetNuke) is the most popular open source application framework for the Microsoft .NET platform.  They boast about 7 million downloads to date, and 400,000 websites running on DNN so far.  DNN has a big following, and plenty of third party support.   The architecture supports modules and skins, and there are thousands of each available at sites such as www.marketplace.dotnetnuke.com, www.snowcovered.com, and www.codeplex.com.  You can also create your own custom modules and skins.

Among the many terrific sites created with DNN are TV Guide,  Indian Motorcycle, and Chicago 2016.  (Did you know Chicago is bidding for the summer Olympics in 2016?)  I have to say these are among the most visually stunning sites I’ve seen.  Talk about eye candy!

DNN was created in 2002 as an open source project called the IBuySpy portal.  It was used by Microsoft to showcase the capabilities of the newly released ASP.NET 1.0 platform.  Shaun Walker released an enhanced version of the portal later that year.  It drew a large developer following, and in 2003, the open source project was renamed DotNetNuke.

In February of this year, the company released DNN Professional Edition.  This edition has more formalized testing and release standards, and is intended for corporations building mission critical enterprise software.  They provide support, additional documentation, certification, and indemnification.  The pricing for the Professional Edition is $1,995 per year, per production IIS server the system is running on.  You can run multiple portals and hundreds of sites on each IIS server, at no additional charge.

The Community Edition is still free.  We will see differentiation in product features over time, with the Professional Edition gaining more standard modules.  The framework will be the same in both editions, as compatibility is critical to the third party development community.

We had a chance to talk about some of the new features coming in DNN Professional 5.1, due for release by June 1, 2009.  Nik writes about it in the DNN Blog, which I highly recommend. While the details are not yet public, I can tell you that I am impressed by what was shared with me.  These are exciting days for the DNN open source community.

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Montreal, Quebec

I wish I were attending the SharePoint Summit conference in Montreal this week. We use it at DesignMind. It really enhances our collaboration and content management processes. It’s no wonder that Forbes Magazine calls SharePoint the “Ultimate Business Timesaver”.

According to InfoWorld, MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) 2007 is the fastest growing product in Microsoft’s history and has “as many uses as a Swiss Army knife”. Its six focus areas are collaboration, portal, search, ECM (enterprise content management), business process management, and business intelligence.

Ford Motor uses SharePoint for its dealer portal, and the Marines have deployed collaborative applications to aid their efforts in Iraq. In Scotland, the entire K-12 education community is connected via SharePoint.

The great thing about SharePoint is that it offers a single environment for all your information and collaboration tasks and it’s easy to learn, use, and personalize. It has a single platform and well-integrated set of technologies to manage and lower user support requirements. Can you tell I’m a big fan?

I’m also a fan of Formula One racing, so the following bit of news made me particularly happy. If you like fast cars check out the new Ferrari.com site which was built with MOSS 2007.

Ferrari F430

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You may have heard about SQLCAT, Microsoft’s prestigious SQL Server Customer Advisory Team.  SQLCAT member Burzin Patel lives here in the Bay Area and is a favorite speaker at the San Francisco SQL Server User Group.  He’s also an author of the SQL Server 2005 Administrator’s Companion.  Recently I sat down with Burzin to learn more about what those cats at SQLCAT are up to.

MG:  You’re a member of the SQLCAT team.  What can you tell us about the team’s mission, and your role?

BP:  The SQL Customer Advisory Team works on some of the largest SQL Server projects across the world targeting the most challenging and innovative applications deployed on SQL Server and providing a unique value-add from a technical & project experience perspective.  We also conduct architecture and design reviews covering performance, operation, scalability and availability aspects of a deployment, and formulate case-studies/reports on the projects we work on.

Burzin Patel, SQLCAT whiz

MG:  What do you think is the most compelling reason for an organization to upgrade to SQL Server 2008?

BP:  SQL Server 2008 offers many new and improved features and functionalities which are particularly well suited for large enterprise customers.  Features like transparent data encryption, auditing, back and data compression, enhanced performance monitoring using the new Data Collector and Management Data Warehouse features make upgrading to SQL Server 2008 too compelling a proposition to pass on.  In addition, there are also a slew of new offerings in Business Intelligence.

MG:  You co-authored SQL Server 2005 Administrator’s Companion.  Are you working on another book?

BP:  Ironically, I was and was half way through my chapters for the SQL Server 2008 Administrator’s Companion book when the publisher was forced to cancel it due to the downturn in the economy.

MG:  Your main expertise revolves around SQL Server.  Do you spend much time digging into other key Microsoft technologies (.NET, SharePoint, Silverlight, etc.)?

BP:  You’re right – my main focus is certainly SQL Server, but coming from a development background I have a strong passion for application development and often spend time developing .NET apps.

MG:  What’s the most difficult technical problem you’ve ever had to solve?

BP:  I’d say the most challenging technical problem was designing and implementing an end to end benchmark test to measure the performance of an eCommerce site.  This project included starting from scratch and installing, configuring, tuning the web, apps and database servers which were scaled out across 30+ servers.  The project took more than two months to complete and by virtue of it never been done before, involved some of the most challenging design problems.

MG:  Thanks Burzin!

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Brad McGehee and me in Mountain View

On St. Paddy’s Day we were fortunate to have Microsoft MVP and well-known author Brad McGehee speak to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group.  Not only did Brad “the Hawaiian Irishman” wear a green shirt to the meeting at the Microsoft campus, but he left the crowd of almost 60 fans with a lot of good tips about advancing their careers.

Brad, as the Director of DBA Education for Red Gate Software, flies all around the world speaking at events such as SQL PASS, European PASS, SQL Connections, SQLTeach, SQLBits, SQL Saturdays, TechFests, and Code Camps.

Why would anyone want to become a DBA? There are at least three good reasons.

• DBAs earn more than developers, on average
• DBA jobs are expected to grow much faster than average compared to all other jobs
• According to eWeek, DBAs are the second hardest job to fill after Enterprise Architect

Click here to see Brad’s presentation “How to Become an Exceptional DBA“.

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