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#SQLSat61, DC Edition: Free SQL Server Training in Reston, VA on December 4

by on November 22, 2010

I’m Going to See the PresidentSQLSat #61 in Reston, VA

OK, this isn’t really true. Unless the President comes to SQLSaturday. It’s free, and he’s invited like everyone else.

I’m Talking About Partitioning!

This part is all true. And it’s awesome.

I’m giving an introductory session on horizontal table partitioning in SQL Server, and I’ll dish up all the goods you need to know about the feature.

Here’s the deal with table partitioning: it can be extremely beneficial to businesses in the right situations, and when specific changes to schema and application queries are possible. But if you’re doing it wrong, things can get ugly pretty fast. How do you know where it’s a good choice and what you need to do? It’s complicated.

In my talk I’ll cover all the basics of the feature, we’ll talk about requirements, pros and cons, gotchas, and the implications of partitioning for applications. I’ll give you what you need to be a scalability hero.

Is It Hard to Get To?

Not at all, my friend. This event is in Reston, VA and is very close to Dulles airport. For other out of towners, there’s lots o’ great flight deals into Dulles. And there’s a great slate of speakers signed up, so come on out.

How Do I Sign Up?

Click here for more information on the event.

Hope to see you on December 4.

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SQLPASS Day 1 and 2: Please Focus Your Attention on the Command Prompt

by on November 10, 2010

Words to Live By

A sign will be henceforth posted on my office door which reads: “PLEASE FOCUS YOUR ATTENTION ON THE COMMAND PROMPT.”

ooooo.... ahhhh...

And I will always make sure to remember to be careful when working with the Engine of the Devil.

Get Your Conference On: They’re Selling DVDs

If you’re a first timer at SQLPass, buy the DVDs. They’re $125 during the summit, and they free you up to take time to meet others at the conference, use the Ask the Experts and SQL CAT resources, and generally do all sorts of things you can’t do at home later.

Take Time to Ask the Experts (4th Floor and Developer Pods)

Developer Pods are on the sixth floor with bright yellow chairs– people from the “Ask the Experts” area have been deployed to PODS throughout the convention center.

I had a great visit to the Ask the Experts room last year and got some great ideas talking about problems and questions in my production environment, and highly recommend meeting the experts before you leave.

We’re Going Parallel: Project Madison Grows up

In Ted Kummert’s keynote on Day 1, he announced that SQL 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse has now RTM’d and appliances are available for purchase. The appliances were on stage and Jesse Fountain demonstrated creating a table, connecting to PDW, and loading data.

Demo: based on a 100TB database, created and loaded in two days on a four rack system. Query that runs against 800 billion rows of data. Dynamic process monitor shows processor usage of all the cores, and you can view the health of the physical nodes. This was all in what looked like a Reporting Services interface.

Takeaway: DBAs love hardware, and this had us all drooling. A netbook was given away to to a lucky attendee with a ticket under their seat. Next year, can we win a Madison appliance?

Overall, it’s hard to say from a short demo how this appliance would fit with your workload. But it’s easy to want to learn more.

The Cloud: Still Here! Even Cloudier!

We’re used to talking about the cloud each year, and this year is no different.  Today Ted talked about the Azure platform – emphasis was on providing “a consistent platform, from server to service.”

A new community technology preview is coming with Web Administration, Reporting, and DataSync.  We saw demos of SQL Azure reporting.

Takeaway: Cloud services are maturing and moving along. This continues to look like a great solution for some businesses, and as tools are added for manageability and reporting, this will become adopted by more people.

DENALI: CTP Available!

First off, the CTP for Denali is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/product-info/future-editions.aspx

Denali features that I’m most interested in include:

  • High availability and disaster recovery features grounded in Windows Clustering. This is the ‘AlwaysOn’ set of high availability features:
    • Tools in Management Studio
    • Wizards allow you to create a “management group” for specific databases. This group will be failed over as a unit.
    • You can fail over to multiple secondaries (up to four) using mirroring.
    • Shared disk can be used.
    • Some secondaries can be set to manual failover/asynchronous, while others are set to automatic failover/synchronous.
    • Secondaries can be readable.
    • Your backups can be offloaded to secondaries!
    • Wait, do you need any more? You don’t, do you? DROOL.
  • Provide new a unified developer experience in Visual Studio, and also in a standalone tool. All BIDS projects will be unified together with a new database project type in a single development environment.
  • Columnar Indexes: faster reads, improved query processing.
  • Filetable:
    • Files can be imported into SQL Server
    • The files can still be previewed in an interface on the Windows system, although they reside in SQL Server
    • The files can be indexed and managed in SQL Server, attributes are maintained in SQL Server
  • PowerPivot engine moves into Analysis Services
  • Developer tools: new toolkit in Visual Studio, Project Juneau, for development.
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SQLPASS Maps to the Good Stuff

by on November 4, 2010

For Your Smartphones! Maps to Someplace Awesome

For alla y’all who like my Seattle 101 Section, I set this up as a sticky post with links to maps collections. This will make it easy for smartphone navigation.

Map for Coffee n Chocolates n Donuts

Map for Breakfast

Map for Dinner n Drinx

Map for Billiards, Karaoke, and things on the way there

Place descriptions are still on the pages here on my blog– to get to my notes, just head back to Seattle 101.

And welcome to Seattle!

(Note: I’ll be adding all collections gradually over the next day or two.)

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SQLPASS 101 Update: Get to Your Hotel Quickly and Cheaply!

by on November 3, 2010

Hello, Fellow Cheapskates!

And hello to anyone else who wants an easy ride downtown from SeaTac.

You can get from SeaTac to downtown (Westlake Station) in about 40 minutes for $2.50 per person by riding our new Light Rail System.

Check out the details here in the Seattle 101 Section.

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TSQL Tuesday #12: Why Are DBA Skills Necessary? Fido, Please Turn Your Head And Cough.

by on November 2, 2010

TSQL2SDAY #12!TSQL Tuesday Came Early This Month

It’s sort of like Daylight Savings time for #TSQL2sday. Since PASS is next week and we’ll all be busy tweeting from the convention center instead of talking to one another face to face (or the opposite, take your pick), we’re blogging a week early.

This month’s topic is hosted by Paul Randal (blog | twitter), and the topic is “Why are DBA skills necessary?”

Quick, A Metaphor!

Having a DBA around is like having a veterinarian on staff. When you are managing enough animals and their health really matters, you make sure you have a specialist on staff who can respond to them and give you advice on their care and feeding. (In this metaphor, the animal  is the application. SQL Server supports its combination of organs and gooey living-systems.)

The main areas that are covered by vets and DBAs are all the same:

  • birth
  • death
  • growth
  • prevention of illness (food, grooming, cleaning, habits, etc)
  • prescription and administration of medicine
  • force feeding and purging as required, and other REALLY gross things

Even if your developers know a lot about animals and are splicing together genes to make a new hypo-allergenic bunny, you still want a veterinarian. Mad scientists are great for creating new things: keeping them alive is a different skillset.

Not Just Everyone Keeps A Veterinarian At Home

True enough. For most purposes, calling in a specialist for advice periodically works well enough. And for the most part, the

 

Baroo?

 

specialist can help you do all the gross and difficult and tricky things yourself pretty well.

You can be your own at-home veterinarian just as well as you can be your own at-home DBA.

Fido, please turn your head and cough.

Be Careful Who You Trust

If you want to keep your animal or your business alive, it’s important to make sure you have the right level of care. And that you’re taking care of things properly as you go along, and have the right level of attention for your particular issues.

Remember: you’re not going to just ask anyone for help, and if you’re in a tight situation, you’re going to pay through the nose. Or Fido’s nose.

Do You Need A DBA if You Don’t Have a Traditional RDBMS?

If you rely on data heavily and actively develop products that have scale considerations, my answer is yes: you want someone to have an operational perspective and focus on DBA type issues. I think this holds true even if you no longer need to run older style data integrity and backups (if that is automagically handled for you).

In that world, I think it’s all just a little more automated and high tech: but you still want someone to operationally understand your performance, your data structures, how application changes affect data, and to understand and develop your story for scalability, availability, and recovery.

Even if the animals get fancier, you still need someone to keep them healthy. And breathing. For the most part.

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