Ginneblog

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.

 Send to Twitter

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.

 Send to Twitter

Perhaps you’ve heard this astonishing figure.  At Amazon.com, every 100 ms of latency costs the company 1% in sales. Sumeet Bansal, Principal Solutions Architect at Fusion-io, referenced the Amazon study as he separated myth from reality about Solid State Storage and its role in the modern Database enterprise system.  

Fusion-io is a producer of enterprise-class SSDs.  Their silicon-based storage architecture known as ioMemory applies flash memory to large-scale enterprise storage products like Storage Area Networks.

Sumeet’s presentation to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group on Tuesday included a variety of reasons why SQL Server  DBAs, as well as other technologists, should be excited about SSD’s.  He stressed that SSD’s are ready for the enterprise today.  His description of the things to look out for when purchasing SSD’s was quite useful – kind of like the Consumer Reports of SSD’s.

This list of differentiators is probably part of why Steve Wozniak joined Fusion-io as Chief Scientist – “the Woz” wouldn’t put his energies into anything but the most promising technologies.  And neither would Sumeet, who came over to Fusion-io from Wine.com, where he was VP of IT at the San Francisco company.

David Leston walked away happy, and probably stayed up very late installing his blazingly fast 320 GB Fusion-io Solid State Drive (SSD).  He won the coveted door prize, which was generously donated by Fusion-io. 

I hadn’t met David before tonight, but he was on the same wavelength as our speaker.  Sumeet’s discussion of SSD’s pointed out that you don’t purchase SSD’s based on cost per GB, but rather by the value of the performance gains and reliability. 

It was particularly interesting to hear comments from the audience about how Microsoft and other vendors will start optimizing performance based on SSD-equipped systems, in addition to conventional drives.  Right now there’s an assumption of significant latency when going to the drive.  As the operating systems see great reductions in latency, additional optimizations will add to the performance gains of this breakthrough technology.

 Send to Twitter

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.

 Send to Twitter

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“.

 Send to Twitter