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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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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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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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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.

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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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In my recent post on how MySpace is using SQL Server, I mentioned that the original MySpace.com was built with ColdFusion.  Even though MySpace moved to Microsoft .NET, there’s a very active ColdFusion community, fostered by Adobe.

As luck would have it, I had a chance to spend some time this week with ColdFusion guru Raymond Camden.  He’s co-author of the ColdFusion MX Developer’s Handbook, Mastering ColdFusion MX, and the Adobe ColdFusion 8 Web Application Construction Kit.  Along the way Ray has contributed to roughly a dozen other ColdFusion-related books.  He also runs several technical websites, and blogs at ColdFusionJedi.

Ray was here in the San Francisco Bay Area working with Adobe as they prepare for Adobe MAX 2009.  Ray will be a featured speaker at the conference, which will be held from October 4-7 in Los Angeles.

Our time was spent preparing for, and delivering, a presentation on migrating from Oracle Forms to ColdFusion – something we hope to be doing for an upcoming project.  We are also teaming up with Peter Koletzke, co-author of Oracle Developer Advanced Forms & Reports and Oracle JDeveloper 10g for Forms & PL/SQL Developers.  I’m very excited to have Ray and Peter, leading experts in their respective fields, working with the DesignMind team.

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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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Earlier this month Microsoft released the first beta of a new free tool – the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit – that makes it easy to perform SEO analysis on your site and identify and fix issues within it.

Scott Guthrie’s excellent blog tells all about it.  Thanks to E.R. Gilmore at Travis Medical Software for pointing it out to me.   The new SEO Toolkit looks incredibly useful, and at DesignMind we’re starting to test it out on several client websites.  I’ll report back on its effectiveness.  I’ll also try to arrange a demo of this toolkit at an upcoming meeting of the San Francisco .NET User Group.

Scott Guthrie runs the development teams at Microsoft responsible for ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, IIS, and various Visual Studio Tools.

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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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