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The SQL Server 2008 R2 Launch Event in Santa Clara was great.  More than 300 SQL Server and BI professionals were on hand, and the keynote was followed by three tracks of sessions that lasted the rest of the day.

Buck Woody, Microsoft’s “Real World DBA” was on his best behavior, but still had some great zingers and one-liners.  He handed the baton to Tom Casey, who was followed up by Fausto Ibarra and Sabrena McBride, giving an R2 demo.   Our own Ross Mistry, SQL Server MVP and our new host for the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group, was also a featured speaker.  You can download Ross’s latest book, Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, here for free. 

During the intro, I had a chance to tell the crowd about our Bay Area PASS Chapters, and to officially announce the new Bay Area Microsoft Business Intelligence User Group.  That group will hold its first meeting in Mountain View on June 10th, and its second meeting, in San Francisco, on July 1st.  The group’s co-founders, Alex Viera, Elizabeth Diamond, and I, look forward to launching the group and continuing to help build the local Microsoft BI community.

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Microsoft is launching SQL Server 2008 R2 on May 25, 2010 at the Santa Clara Marriott.  Attendees will get have the chance to learn about the new features, ranging from PowerPivot for self-service BI to StreamInsight, the latest version of Microsoft’s flagship database product. 

You can register for the free all-day event SQL Server R2 Launch Event here.   

Tom Casey, Microsoft’s General Manager for SQL Server BI will deliver the keynote for this event.  It looks like I will have the privilege of introducing him.  During my introduction, I will provide the details about our new PASS Chapter, the Bay Area Microsoft Business Intelligence User Group.  

Here’s a recent interview with Tom Casey on Microsoft’s BI Strategy in SQL Server Magazine.

If you’re interested in learning about StreamInsight, contact me for slides from the May 2010 Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group meeting with Mark Simms of Microsoft’s esteemed SQLCAT.

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Captain Kirk - a cloud pioneer

By default, when you upload a document or any other large file to SharePoint, it gets stored as a Binary Large OBject   (BLOB) in the content database in SQL Server.  As revisions are made, each version of that file also gets stored (not just the differences).  The amount of BLOB data grows significantly faster than associated metadata, causing SharePoint to consume large amounts of expensive SQL Storage space.   Burzin talked about externalizing BLOB storage, as well as options for storing infrequently used BLOBs in the Cloud.  These approaches can help ease the backup and storage cost problems content-heavy SharePoint sites encounter. 

Burzin’s SharePoint Storage Best Practices talk also covered Configuration, Maintenance, and Performance Tuning.  He explained some of the unusual stresses SharePoint puts on SQL Server, and offered suggestions on how to avoid degraded performance.  If you’re planning a significant SharePoint implementation, you’ll want to take a close look at his specific recommendations regarding recommended I/O Capacities, Database configuration and sizing, processors and memory. 

Given the headaches SharePoint BLOBs cause in many organizations, it makes sense that StorSimple has a complete solution to externalize them. Their storage-on-demand appliance provides tiered storage for SharePoint with the option to secure and store infrequently updated BLOBs to the cloud to achieve substantial cost savings.  According to Ursheet Parikh, StorSimple’s Founder and CEO, Burzin’s extensive SQL Server and SharePoint experience make him a key member of the StorSimple team. 

I’ll write about StorSimple’s product in an upcoming post, and will follow that with a case study once DesignMind has had a chance to implement StoreSimple’s Cloud Storage Solution for one of our clients.  For data storage, Space is the Final Frontier.

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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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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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 Recently I spoke with Paul Bertucci, Chief Data Architect/Enterprise Architecture at Autodesk. Paul is a recognized expert in Data Base Design, Modeling, Analysis, and Architecture, and author of the best selling SQL Server Unleashed series, SQL Server High Availability, and other books.  He spoke with me about SQL Server’s growing acceptance with enterprise IT professionals.

Microsoft is preparing to release SQL Server 2008. What is in this version that will help the enterprise? How about small and medium businesses?

SQL Server 2008, in all respects, is essentially released (RTM). There will be no changes to its footprint. This version touts stability, scalability, availability and interoperability. Massive organizations around the globe are crossing over to a SQL Server-based foundation. Rapidly moving even their most critical applications (like ERP -from SAP – on a SQL Server based underpinning). Now that’s prime time!

SMB’s have really led the charge here. They have always been quick to adopt SQL Server due to price point and ease of management. Larger enterprises have learned from them (and often was that small or medium company, but grew into a large enterprise without changing away from SQL Server). I am also seeing almost exclusively the use of the 64-bit version. The much lower costs associated with 64-bit hardware, coupled with the high performance of SQL Server on a 64-bit platform, is just short of incredible.

Have you seen SQL Server’s adoption in the enterprise evolve over time?

Good question. So, the phenomenon I watch, day in and day out, is one of fringe (or non-IT supported) groups using SQL Server first in a typical large enterprise. This is often occurring in what we call “Shadow IT”.
 
Groups outside of the normal IT realm have huge data needs (don’t we all), but cannot be serviced fast enough by traditional large IT development cycles. They turn to something they can quickly build on their own and that is easy to maintain and grow (all with a cheap price tag). As these satellite systems grow and change, IT often is asked to take them over or absorb the somehow. This has been a repeating pattern over and over, and the good enterprise IT organizations have recognized this and have changed their corporate database standard to include SQL Server.
 
Although rarely corporate IT’s first choice, SQL Server is no longer treated as a toy database or as the second choice.
 
What do you do in your role as Chief Data Architect for Autodesk?

I joined Autodesk in 2008 in this role. I was previously at Symantec for nearly four years in the same role. My job is to set data strategy that aligns closely to the business drivers of the company. This is, in turn, translated into current, mid-term, and long-term data architectures and technologies.
 
Part of my job is evangelizing key data related initiatives such as master data management/data quality, data availability, data security, and data delivery (such as with BI/DW platforms). I have special interest in keeping my hands dirty in things like database design reviews, defining performance and tuning approaches, setting data standards and guidelines, sitting on data governance boards and chairing the corporate Architecture and Technology review board. All fun stuff I can assure you.
 
And let’s not forget SOA, as this is rapidly affecting the way we need to get to data, manage data, and share data (both internally and externally). I have a rule that we cannot expose a business service (under a SOA paradigm), unless the data that is used by that service is of the highest quality and meets strict service level agreements (on availability and integrity). Otherwise, don’t bother.
 
When will your new book, SQL Server 2008 Unleashed, be available?

The SQL Server 2008 Unleashed co-authors are deep into production mode on this next release. We anticipate it being available in the summer of 2009.
 
We’re taking a little different slant on this next version that will include even more live customer examples that should be easily leveraged by all of our readers. We have always included tons of examples and even scripts and code on the CD that comes with the book. This will only increase for this next book. We’re very excited!

Thanks, Paul!

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