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.

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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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We got the word on Friday, April 16, that Microsoft SharePoint 2010 was released to Manufacturing.  Check out what the SharePoint Team Blog has to say about it.

You can sign up here to watch the Office 2010 + SharePoint 2010 Virtual Launch event coming on May 12.
 
Here in San Francisco, the DesignMind team is very excited about this release. Our clients will now be able to leverage many of the new features. Our team will be able to do more custom development, with less effort, than MOSS 2007 required.
 
We’ve also been waiting impatiently because we will soon be re-launching  the designmind.com site, using SharePoint 2010 as the platform.  I’ll let you know how that goes, as our own launch date approaches.
 
In the meantime, congratulations to the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 team for some really great work! 

Here’s Huey Lewis at the SharePoint Conference 2009.

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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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At the November 2009 PASS Summit in Seattle, one of the outstanding keynote presentations was by Dr. Dave DeWitt, Microsoft Fellow, and leader of the Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Lab, in Madison, WI.  I received a copy of his slide deck from PASS Headquarters, which you can see below.

Dr. DeWitt is working on releases 1 and 2 of SQL Server Parallel Database Warehouse.  In his keynote he reviewed the 30 year history of CPU, memory, and disk performance.  Variations in performance gains across these subsystems, with disk performance lagging badly, have major impacts on database system performance.

Disk performance gains have been made in three areas, Capacity, Transfer Rate, and Average Seek Time.  However, the gains over the last 30 years have not been uniform.

Capacity of high performance disk drives has increased by a factor of 10,000.  Transfer rates have increased by a factor of 65.  The average seek time has only increased by a factor of 10.  Dr. DeWitt talked about the impact of these discrepancies on OLTP and Data Warehouse applications. 

One of his conclusions is that some problems can be fixed through smarter software, but that “SSDs provide the only real help.”

Fusion-io

We learned more about SSD’s during the Fusion-io presentation to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group.  The DesignMind team has also been evaluating SSDs to determine situations where we can provide our clients with the most leverage.  Plus here’s a terrific video which shows SSD’s in action. 

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I just had to share this terrific demo of the ioDrive in action.  Here’s Father Robert Ballecer interviewing Fusion-io President and CTO David Flynn.

Father Robert is a Jesuit Priest.  The video was produced by Tech Stop at the Center for Apostolic Technology, headquartered in San Jose, California.  How cool is that?

Sumeet Bansal of Fusion-io will speak to the San Francisco SQL Server User Group on November 11, 2009.   We’ll be at the Microsoft office on Market Street in downtown San Francisco.  Please consider joining us.

You can see more from Father Robert on the Gadget You Tube channel.

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A prospective DesignMind client in San Francisco is making modest use of SharePoint 2003, and is considering a move to MOSS 2007.  The reasoning is good. They can do an incremental rollout, and gain immediate value from SharePoint’s ability to index documents, including PDFs.

In preparation for the meeting, I had to refresh my memory in two very important areas.  First, I needed a Comparison of the features of SharePoint 2003 with those of MOSS 2007. 

The second major question to answer was which features are included in each version of SharePoint?  

Here’s another useful site Comparing WSS and MOSS. 

The last gem I uncovered was an excellent PowerPoint file covering the Functionality in MOSS 2007 and Office 2007.  This is a great resource for those thinking about leveraging the integration Microsoft has delivered in these two major toolsets.  It will help us make the right recommendations to our clients when it comes to purchasing Standard vs. Enterprise Client Access Licenses. 

No doubt there’s a ton of information to sift through on MOSS.  Next I’ll look forward to reviewing the comparisons between MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010.  I must say I’m pleased that Microsoft is making our lives easier by by shifting back to the name SharePoint rather than MOSS…read my June 3rd Ginneblog post for more on the rollout of SharePoint 2010.

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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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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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