Darryl Burling

Microsoft BI Conference - SQL v.Next

darryl.burling.nospam@nospam.microsoft.com (darryl) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:02:17 +1200

At the Microsoft BI conference this week we announced some of our internal projects. The two of interest are:

Microsoft SQL Server v.Next code named "Kilimanjaro"
Project "Madison"

SQL Server "Kilimanjaro" is focused specifically around BI (hence it's announcement at the BI Conference) and "Madison" is the integration of the DATAllegro technologies with Windows and SQL Server.

CTP drops will start over the next 12 months with RTM (currently) expected in 2010.

For more information on these, read the press release or watch the BI Conference day 1 keynote (Low, Medium, High)

Virtualization Support in SQL Server

darryl.burling.nospam@nospam.microsoft.com (darryl) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:53:25 +1200

Slow off the mark on this one (Hillary beat me to it).

SQL Server 2008 Enterprise has been supported on Hyper-V since RTM, but the announcement today is that from today:

SQL Server 2008 and 2005 are both supported on Hyper-V and Hyper-V Server
SQL Server 2008 and 2005 are both supported on selected third party products

The list of supported third party products is located here and currently includes:

Cisco WAAS Virtual Blades 4.1.1
Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2
VMWare ESX 3.5 Update 2
XenServer 5

The official landing page for the support policy around SQL on Virtual hardware is here and will be updates if/as things change.

I recently heard of someone who moved their SQL 2005 Server from physical hardware to Hyper-V and saw significantly improved performance.

The virtualisation story is certainly getting interesting.

SQL Server DBA Training Forum

darryl.burling.nospam@nospam.microsoft.com (darryl) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:47:09 +1200

Click here to skip to Registration

On November 4-6 we are running three one day training courses aimed at DBA's which are designed to jumpstart your knowledge of SQL Server 2008 planning and deployment.

If you design solutions on SQL Server, maintain SQL Server databases or are evaluating SQL Server for deployment, this training will prove useful.

The training will be run by Jeremy Boyd (SQL Server MVP and all round nice guy).

Agenda/Content

You'll want to be there at around 8:15 for a 8:30am sharp start. The day will be over at 4:30pm after which you can either hang around for a bit to talk further or head home before the traffic gets really nasty.

Here is what the day will look like:

8:30-10am – Overview of SQL Server 2008

What is new in SQL Server 2008 that makes it worth seriously considering? What is the difference between Web, Standard and Enterprise? All these things are covered in this introduction to SQL Server 2008. This is a 200 level session intended to give you a overview of what the new capabilities and tools are in the product and where they will be useful to you.

10:15-11:30 – Migrating from SQL Server 2000/2005 to SQL Server 2008

There are many new changes in SQL Server 2008, particularly when upgrading from SQL Server 2000. Is it worth migrating? If so, where do you start? How can you approach this? What about DTS to SSIS migrations? This session will give you some considerations and approaches to take away with you to help you make the right decisions and the migration to SQL 2008 whether it be from SQL 2000 or SQL 2005.

11:45-1pm – SQL Server Architecture

Architecture is about ensuring that solutions are available and scalable. This includes thinking through how to allow other stakeholders get the most from the solution. This session will explore how much developers can do with SQL Server 2008 and how DBA’s should architect their implementation to provide the key features developers will build into their applications without compromising the service the database server provides. We will also look at and discuss the various architectures that you can consider when using SQL Server 2008 technologies.

-- lunch –-

1:45-3pm – High availability and resilience

Mirroring, clustering and replication have come a long way in SQL Server 2008. In addition there are new features such as the Resource Governor that will ensure that your mission critical applications never suffer from contention with other applications. This session will give you a solid understanding of these technologies and when to use them.

3:15-4:30 – SQL Server Management

Managing SQL Server 2008 servers is easier than ever before. Check out how policy based management in SQL Server 2008 will reduce risks, how configuration servers allow you to group servers together for easier management and get an introduction into SQL PowerShell to really jump start your management framework.

Throughout the day there will be opportunities to ask questions and get expert answers and talk to your peers and see how they've done things.

Registration

To register, click one of the links below. There is no charge for this training - although no-shows will get the special benefit of being shamed publicly before their peers :-)

Tuesday, November 4 - Wellington - The Brewery Bar (upstairs conference room) (Register)
Wednesday, November 5 - Auckland - The Duxton Hotel (Register)
Thursday, November 6 - Christchurch - Christchurch Convention Centre (Register)

Quick bites - October 7

darryl.burling.nospam@nospam.microsoft.com (darryl) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:34:01 +1200

I've been meaning to put up a bunch of posts, but I haven't had time, so here is the quick list of things I was going to post about.

Visual Studio Team Developer and Database Combine
This is big news, and I should have mentioned this last week... The news is that if you own a subscription for Visual Studio Team Edition for Database professionals or Developers, these two products have now combined, meaning you get two products for the price of one. This was actually announced in the "futures" announcement (below), but more details about what this means is on the Data Dude blog.

Developer Tools futures news
Last week we provided a little more information about .Net 4.0, Visual Studio 2010 and Windows Server, code named "Dublin". You'll find the details on Steve Martins blog, but there is also an overview in word format you can get from here. There will be lots more futures news when PDC hits later this month.

BizTalk Server 2009
A month ago we announced that the next release of BizTalk Server will be called BizTalk Server 2009 rather than BizTalk Server 2006 R3. Personally I'm really happy about this, and it validates the importance of this release of BizTalk. Fore more on what will be in this release (and there is some cool stuff) check out the roadmap.

What is SQL Server Web?

darryl.burling.nospam@nospam.microsoft.com (darryl) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:09:40 +1200

I've had a few questions about SQL Server Web already, so here is an extract from a licensing white paper that explains what it is and where it fits.

"SQL Server 2008 Web is a new version specifically geared for the hosting industry. It may be used only to support public and Internet-accessible Web sites, pages, applications, and services."

What is the difference between SQL Server Web and other editions? I pulled this chart which gives a pretty good comparison. You can also see from this chart that there is lots of value in SQL Server 2008 Enterprise.

For more information on what is and is not in SQL Server 2008 Web Edition, check out the datasheet.

SQL Standard or Enterprise?

darryl.burling.nospam@nospam.microsoft.com (darryl) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:34:00 +1200

One of the questions when selecting a version of SQL Server is what edition do I need and what can I get away with. For customers deploying solutions on SQL that are intended to be mission critical the question is generally a question of SQL Standard or SQL Enterprise?

In SQL Server 2005 there was significant difference between Standard and Enterprise for Business Intelligence and SQL Server Integration Services, but most people weren't too worried about what they missed out on (full comparison here)

In SQL Server 2008, there are significantly more reasons to go for Enterprise rather than Standard Edition.

Bear in mind that the key scenarios targeted by SQL Enterprise is described as:

"SQL Server 2008 Enterprise is a comprehensive data platform for running mission critical online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehousing (DW) and business intelligence (BI) applications. SQL Server 2008 Enterprise provides enterprise class scalability, high availability and security to meet the high demands of these applications."

Having said that here is a quick list of some of the key features in SQL Server 2008 Enterprise that are not found in SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition:

Hypervisor support (in Hyper-V)
Database snapshots
Indexed views
Resource governor
Compression (both data and backup)
Partitioning
Transparent Encryption with 3rd party key management
Transaction auditing (excellent for compliance)
Change data capture
Report scale-out
Grouped server management (one command can be sent to multiple servers)

The full list of differences can be found here. Over the next few weeks I'll be explaining what these features do at a high level.

SQL Certified Master Program

darryl.burling.nospam@nospam.microsoft.com (darryl) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:36:00 +1200

I've spent a little time with Greg Low recently and one of the things he's involved in is the board directing the SQL Server Master certification.

This program is the elite certification program for SQL Server DBA's and consists of a rigorous three week training course delivered by guru's in SQL Server (Greg does a couple of days worth, Kim Tripp and Paul Randall are doing the first week). This training is deep and technical - Greg spends half a day explaining tempdb.

Because the master certification is about to go through its first public Beta the team are offering a 50% discount on the first scheduled event in October. The October course starts on October 20 and finished on November 8. Given the fees are nearly US$20k, this is a significant discount.

For more details on the master program, start here. To see what it takes to register, check this page out, register here.

New Microsoft marketing videos

darryl.burling.nospam@nospam.microsoft.com (darryl) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:09:55 +1200

There is going to be a bunch of stuff around the Windows Campaign come out. Here is one that came out today :-)

I quite like some of the new stuff that I've seen on this - time will tell what everyone else thinks though.

Pride - I'm a PC

Update: Check out the updated windows.com site for more, also links to all the videos are now up on the press pass site.

Tech Ed Evals - top sessions and speakers

darryl.burling.nospam@nospam.microsoft.com (darryl) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 11:53:24 +1200

I've just got the Tech Ed evals back in and thought I'd put up some of the results for all to see. Before I do that - if you are a speaker, you should expect to see an email from me in the next 24 hours with full session feedback including all your comments.

Overall Averages

This year we seem to have done much better with the overall feedback than in previous years. The average speaker and session scores are in the table below;

	Tech Ed 2007	Tech Ed 2008
Session Score	7.36	7.5
Speaker Score	7.68	7.79

Top 10 sessions

One of the surprising things is the feedback on the lunchtime sessions this year. The lunchtime sessions were a bit mixed this year - some technical sessions and some not so technical sessions. The feedback overall - including the lunchtime sessions gives us the following top 10:

Code	Name	Speaker	Score
GEN201	Microsoft New Generation Certifications	Trika Harms zum Spreckel	8.67
SVR380	HP Insight Dynamics	Darren Wood	8.67
SEC200	Do these 10 things or get 0wn3d	Steve Riley	8.62
UNC303	Going Big! A discussion on deploying large mailboxes with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 without breaking the bank	Sandy Millar	8.59
SOA310	Implementing RESTful services with Windows Communication Foundation 3.5 - Security, scalability and controlling the URI (Part 2 of 2)	Rob Bagby	8.49
SEC201	21st Century Networking	Steve Riley	8.45
ARC209	How IT will change in the next 10 years	Miha Kralj	8.43
SEC305	Virtualization and security: What does it mean for me?	Steve Riley	8.38
SEC306	Privacy: The why, what and how	Steve Riley	8.37
GEN202	How to make your blog suck less	Scott Hanselman	8.33

Its interesting to see Trika's session rate well - certification is clearly of interest to customers! If we take lunchtime sessiosn out of the equation we get the following as the top list of breakout sessions.

Code	Name	Speaker	Score
SEC200	Do these 10 things or get 0wn3d	Steve Riley	8.62
UNC303	Going Big! A discussion on deploying large mailboxes with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 without breaking the bank	Sandy Millar	8.59
SOA310	Implementing RESTful services with Windows Communication Foundation 3.5 - Security, scalability and controlling the URI (Part 2 of 2)	Rob Bagby	8.49
SEC201	21st Century Networking	Steve Riley	8.45
ARC209	How IT will change in the next 10 years	Miha Kralj	8.43
SEC305	Virtualization and security: What does it mean for me?	Steve Riley	8.38
SEC306	Privacy: The why, what and how	Steve Riley	8.37
OFC342	Project and Application Portfolio Management: What, why, how	Youssef Mourra	8.31
DEV375	Reactive Programming	Ivan Towlson	8.27
UNC309	Advanced protection of Exchange Server with Data Protection Manager	Jason Buffington	8.27

Its great to see Ivan's session on Reactive Programming make the top 10 breakout sessions - well done Ivan!

Top 10 speakers

If we roll up the speaker scores to get the top 10 speakers for Tech Ed NZ we get the following list. I hereby announce that these are officially the kings of Tech Ed!

Speaker	Average Score	Sessions Delivered
Steve Riley	8.79	4
Trika Harms zum Spreckel	8.76	1
Scott Hanselman	8.72	3
Miha Kralj	8.52	1
Rob Bagby	8.49	3
Johann Kruse	8.48	2
Greg Low	8.47	2
Yossef Mourra	8.44	1
Sandy Millar	8.38	2
Jason Buffington	8.34	3

The only session in this list from a lunchtime session is Trikas, for what it is worth the next top score in the list is Gary Gross who delivered a single session on Systems Center Mobile Device Manager and scored 8.27. This was followed by the top NZ community speaker who was Ivan Towlson with an average speaker score of 8.21 from two sessions.

My congratulations to all the speakers, but particularly to those speakers who scored in the top 10 with more than one session - this is particularly difficult and shows polished presentation skills that are consistent. Having said that, dont underestimate how hard it is to be in this list - the average speaker score is extremely high - so well done to all those speakers mentioned above!

Tech Ed HOL's

darryl.burling.nospam@nospam.microsoft.com (darryl) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 11:58:12 +1200

I've had a heap of emails asking about the availability of the Hands On Labs that we used at Tech Ed.

So, can you get hold of the HOL's at Tech Ed?

Unfortunately the answer is no. There are a couple of reasons for this.

1) Branding. Many of the labs are branded with Tech Ed and we've been asked not to publish or give them out for this reason.

2) Expiring Evaluation copies of Software. Most (if not all) the eval copies of Windows Server are set to expire today, which means you can't start them anyway.

However, it is not all lost. A good number of the HOL's are also available as Virtual Labs, which means you can run through the material any time using Microsoft servers to run the VM's. There are Virtual labs for both IT Pro and Developer content on a wide range of products (exceeding the ones we had at Tech Ed) and they are available free of charge from the Virtual Labs page. Note that some of the very large labs (e.g. the Security lab with six VM's) may not be available via Virtual Labs.

Finally, if there is a specific lab that you are keen to get hold of, we can release the lab manuals for you to go through in your own time. If you are keen on this, contact Mike using this contact form and he will give you details on how you can get hold of the lab manuals.