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This year I’m one of five candidates for the PASS board of directors, joining fellow candidates Allen Kinsel, Andy Warren, Douglas McDowell, and Geoff Hiten. You can find our mugshots, as well as our campaign promises here.  I was always afraid to run for political office given my illustrious youth.  Luckily we didn’t have Facebook when I was in college! 

It’s an honor to be on the ballot.   Win or lose, I’ll see many of you in Seattle, and will continue contributing to the PASS Community. 

Currently I run three local PASS chapters,  the San Francisco SQL Server User Group, the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group, and the new Bay Area Microsoft Business Intelligence User Group.  Our meetings are free and we usually have 50-70 attendees at each of our meetings.  If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, please check us out!

In case you don’t know about PASS, it’s an international organization, with both local and virtual Chapters, and is a tremendous network for database professionals.

I’ve been involved with the SQL Server community for more than a decade.  During that time, Microsoft has steadily developed their flagship database project into an enterprise-ready powerhouse.  SQL Server 2008 R2 is out there now, bringing many new Business Intelligence capabilities.   I’m really pleased with all the great opportunities that PASS has given me to learn and to get to know so many terrific SQL Server and BI professionals.  Thanks to the PASS Nominations Committee for giving me a chance to get even more involved with this powerhouse community.

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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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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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Christa Stelzmuller, Chief Data Architect at MySpace.com, spoke Wednesday night to the San Francisco SQL Server User Group about the MySpace Service Broker.  Last summer, Christa spoke to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group about the MySpace Data Architecture.  MySpace is an amazing example of what can be done with SQL Server.

Christa started her presentation with a description of Service Broker, and the challenges they faced creating it.  She then covered basic features, advanced features, and the major use cases.  She concluded with a roadmap of their continuing development plans, and some fun examples of how their developers have sometimes used Service Broker to solve their problems in somewhat misguided ways.

Keep an eye out on CodePlex, where her team will be posting their work.  We’ll get a chance to speak more with Christa in early November at the PASS Community Summit in Seattle.

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