SQL Musings

The SQLServerCentral Party

Steve Jones — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:03:45 GMT

I think it went off well this year, and it looks like it will be around next year as well. My initial conversations with PASS have gone well, and I expect a contract as soon as the staff recovers from the Summit.

Pat Wright, former PASS Board member, and super-shutterbug, took a bunch of pictures at the party. As you can see, there were plenty of happy people there:

I look a little confused in this one, but that’s probably because I felt a bit rushed at times. My main job was greeter, bouncer, doorman, so I didn’t get a lot of time in the event.

We had a lot of walkups this year, and I’ll plan for more next year. I actually was under budget for the party, so I ended up buying about 30 Starbucks gift cards and giving them out to people during the conference.

This was the second year in a row where we gave out the Exceptional DBA award. After a brief introduction from me, Brad McGehee (above) read a letter from Josef Richberg, the winner. Gail Shaw then talked a little about what the award means:

Next up was Rodney Landrum, with a few words about the judging.

And then last year’s winner, Dan McClane.

When the ceremony was done, we were back to gambling and having fun.

I usually have some Red Gate folks walking around, giving out prizes to dealers throughout the night. they award people randomly during gameplay and everyone has a chance to win. At the end of the night, I’d saved off a number of prizes. We had 3 great ones, all about $150-200 in value, for the 3 big gamblers.

We had a few other prizes left, and I decided to randomly give them out. Everyone could turn in their chips at the end and get a ticket from the casino people. I drew numbers out of a bin then and we gave away more great prizes.

I’m looking to run the same type of party next year, with lots more prizes, possibly fewer items and more random things at the end. I’ll also be looking to smooth out the event a little.

If you’ve got feedback, let me know. I’ve said it before, this is the best day of my year, and I’m hoping it’s a great one for you.

PASS Summit 2009 – Keynotes

Steve Jones — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:56:19 GMT

I’m not going to look back at the keynotes since I blogged about them. If you are interested, you can read about them:

Instead I’m going to focus on some constructive criticism. I like seeing a great speaker, and I’d like to see 3, 4, or 5 great ones at the PASS Summit in the future. So a few comments.

Be Interesting

Let me say this, other than Kevin Kline’s tribute and Dr. Dewitt’s talk, I had to go back and look at notes to remember what happened. All of the keynotes should be interesting to technical DBAs and developers. It doesn’t have to be a technical presentation, but then make it interesting in a business sense, or use thought provoking topic. Don’t market to us or give us a high level technical view.

PASS Remarks

I think it’s good to have some summaries of what PASS is doing as opening remarks. However I’d like to see them kept short and quick. I would also hope they were relevant to the event. Don’t spend a lot of time promoting the “rah-rah” PASS has these stats, and don’t read the slides.

Use the live Twitter feed, which I thought was cool to see in Wayne’s keynote, but use it to comment on what’s happening. Respond live to something that came up.

Overall I liked the events, and the presentations for exceptional volunteers. However smooth out the processes and get those people up front and ready to come on. So what if they know a day before and tell 12 friends. It’s still a surprise to most people. The tribute to Kevin Kline was wonderful, and anyone that thinks Wayne shouldn’t have cried is out of touch. Kevin deserved recognition for a decade of efforts and I think I might have teared up if I was presenting it.

The other thing I’d say is that you should pick the best speakers from the PASS board. Don’t just stick with a set agenda of the executive committee. The best people in those slots aren’t necessarily the best speakers. The three we had this year do a great job of being loose, but that might not be the case in the future.

Microsoft Keynotes

We had 3 this year. Three executives and one technical fellow. Two good, one bad, in my opinion.

We are SQL Server professionals. In two decades of doing this, the vast, vast majority of the probably thousands of people I have talked to think this way:

We believe in Microsoft products.

Sure, we complain and point out issues. But that’s because they’re issues, not because we want to switch to Oracle, Java, or something else. We’re already sold, we’re using your products, and we want to continue to use them. You don’t need to sell us.

So stop the marketing. Both MS keynotes were too focused on why MS products are great, what we see in new versions, etc. It’s boring, and it’s a waste of a chance to speak to people that already love your products. Give those presentations to mixed audiences, and instead pick something exciting to us. Something that doesn’t just talk new products, but speaks to the audience.

I’ve seen Bill Gates speak a number of times. Quite often he’s made fun of himself, but he’s looked forward. Not at the latest product releases. OK, he’s done that at times, but he’s also made me think. Steve Ballmer talks marketing, but he at least has more energy.

Pick interesting speakers, maybe more technical fellows or Microsoft Research people that will make us think. Pick a business speaker, perhaps like the keynotes from the first Business Intelligence conference, Michael Treacy or Dr. Robert Kaplan.

Make us think.

And pick interesting customer references. Find someone exciting. I talked to the customers later, and they had interesting things to say, but they weren’t interesting on stage. Get people engaged.

Lastly, make them short. The keynotes ran too long this year. Heck, take 5 minutes between them and throw out some MS t-shirts.

Dell Keynote

I’ve watched this twice now. In Denver two years ago and this year in Seattle. I have no idea who presented two years ago, but the guy that did it in 2009 was horrible. No offense to him, and he seems like a smart guy, but a few items that Dell should address.

1. Whoever wrote the presentation, and whoever approved the topic, remove them from the loop. They have no business being involved next year.

2. Know your audience – A high level, this-is-DR presentation is a waste of time for the vast majority of the attendees. A better topic would have been some real life disaster issues and how you would/could prevent them. Or even some of the cool stuff Dell has done in engineering larger servers.

3. Be fascinating - We are much more likely to talk about the Dell keynote positively if it catches our attention. Look to the Dr. DeWitt keynote for an idea of what's interesting. People loved that one. It doesn't have to be theoretical. Tell us how Dell.com handles transactions. Show us something large scale that you do. Pique our interest.

The marketing folks can't help themselves. They somehow try to tie Dell to the keynote and think we'll buy your products. Just stop that. Most of us don't have a choice in what we buy, so stop it. Impress us and we'll mention that to the decision makers.

Bloggers

It was great to have the blogger table this year and last year. I look forward to doing it next year if I'm invited and I think the exchange of tweets in real time adds to the event. One thing I'd recommend here so that people can read through accounts is have a way for us to send our posts to the PASS HQ. Most of us tweet them, but if you had a page we could submit thoughts on each keynote, or each day, that would be great. Or even low-tech with a series of email addresses (day1@sqlpass.org, tomcaseykn@sqlpass.org, etc.) and then have someone post them on the Summit event page, it would be a great way to promote us, and the PASS Summit at the same time.

I'd also like to see some fairly consolidated locations for pictures and videos that people shoot for the Summit. The #sqlpass hash tag seemed to work well, but it would be great to have someone clean up and produce some great timeline of the event a week or so later. Even the videos shown in the morning would be great promotions for the event.

I enjoyed the PASS Summit 2009, and am already looking forward to 2010.

Tomorrow I look back at some of the pictures and video I've seen of the event.

PASS Summit 2009 – Fun

Steve Jones — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:21:00 GMT

I’m not a big party guy, and in fact, more than a few people can attest to the fact that I’m likely to duck out early at evening events. However there are some fun things at PASS that I wanted to mention, and let you know what you can (likely) look forward to next year.

SQLServerCentral

I mention this a lot, at least I think I do, but we typically host an opening night party at the PASS Summit. We’ve done it for 6 or 7 years, and I’ve settled on a casino themed party. We have a code that you can use when you register to get a free ticket, or you can buy a ticket for $30.

We spend all the money that we get for the party on the event. I typically give away a polo shirt and a book to everyone, and then a lot of other prizes. Lots of DVDs, books this year, flash drives, cameras, and more. I save 3 big prizes for the big gamblers (a Zune HD, $150 to Best Buy, and a camera this year), and then randomly gave away other prices like a digital photo frame, to others at the end.

This has also become the event for the Exceptional DBA award presentation.

SQL Karaoke

I heard that after my party on Monday a bunch of people went out to a karaoke bar. I got dragged out there on Thursday night and while I didn’t torture anyone by getting on stage myself, it was great fun for about 20-25 Summit attendees.

I’m not sure that I’d want everyone coming, but there are a few places yo can go and if you have a group of people you’ve met, suggest that they go out and try something. Even wandering down near the water and finding a restaurant to sit and chat in would be great. There are also lots of bars with bands in Seattle.

Gameworks

I’ve always wondered by Gameworks wasn’t more a part of the Summit since it’s across the street from the Convention Center. I’m sure it’s a money thing, but this year it was rented by Microsoft for a Wed night party. I was only there for an hour, but it seemed people really enjoyed it. A great way to get to know someone and have fun playing games.

Vendor Parties

These are typically invitation only, but are a lot of fun. Ask about them at the various booths and see if you can get invited. I typically attend the SQL Sentry party since I’ve known the people working there for years and consider them friends. It’s usually a fairly small affair, but this year was packed with close to 100 people at one point.

Quest also usually throws a big party and I hear great things about it. There are likely other parties as well, so spend some time networking and getting to know vendors. If you are a customer, be sure to ask if something is going on. I also usually attend the Friends of Red Gate dinner as well.

SWAG and Dinner at the Day One dinner

It’s not necessarily a real party, but it can be fun. The end of the first day of sessions takes place in the vendor expo, with dinner catered among the various booths. It’s a chance for you to talk to vendors and grab some swag in a fun atmosphere.

There’s More

There are no shortage of things to do in Seattle, or in any of the other convention cities. Tim Mitchell wrote about being “That Guy” and he certainly wasn’t that guy this year, getting on stage to sing and attending other parties.

There are a number of MVP events, which limits them to a few people, but if you’re a part of that group, be aware.

Seattle is an interesting city, and things are relatively close. Cabs aren’t expensive, especially with 3-4 people sharing them, and you can reach a number of places. Things I’ve done in the past and would recommend:

The Space Needle – Not much here, but it’s a worldwide landmark
The Experience Music Project – Worth going in, and it has a Science fiction Museum in the building.
Seattle Seahawks / Seattle Mariners – Professional sports.
The Underground Tour – I found this fascinating and learned about Seattle history.
Museum of Flight – Good for adults and kids. Walk through a Concorde.

There are other museums and theaters as well if you like those things. I’d even recommend bringing your family the weekend before or after and seeing Seattle. My son and I had a great time in 2008 touring the city.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about the keynotes and some things I think they could do to improve them.

PASS Summit 2009 – Overall Event

Steve Jones — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:45:00 GMT

I thought that we got a great Summit from PASS in 2009. This week I’ll be looking back at some of the things that occurred and give you some notes from my perspective on the event. I’ll also include some pictures from myself and others, along with a few videos where I can.

First, thanks and congrats to the PASS Board, and the PASS Staff, all of whom put together one of the smoothest Summits I’ve seen. It might be the best one, and while there are things that need to be changed or tweaked, the event just ran smoothly.

I wrote some blogs about the keynotes, but for the most part I was meeting people and seeing sessions all week, so I didn’t have time to blog. Heck, I barely had time to write editorials and no time to shoot video of them. The blogs I put out from last week:

I also wrote a bit about the Women in Technology lunch, which was great. I enjoyed it and plan to make that an annual part of my Summit experience. I’d encourage everyone to attend this, and to encourage women to come into technology. It’s not that men don’t need encouragement, but stereotypes often mean an extra effort would help with women.

The overall organization of the event, I thought, was much better this year. I didn’t see people too lost or confused. While many of us attend the Summit yearly, or every other year, a survey showed that this year we had about 40% first time attendees. That’s a big number, and while I saw a few people looking confused (I stopped to ask them if they needed help), it seemed that people easily found sessions and rooms, despite things being spread across 3 floors and both the North and South sides of the Summit.

It also seemed that quite a few people attended a pre- or post-conference session. That’s good to see, both for speakers and attendees. A full day of training, where you can get in depth knowledge on one particular subject. If you were in one of those sessions, I’d love to have specific notes about what value you got from the sessions.

Tomorrow I’ll write about some of the fun events from the Summit, things that are worth going to as a way to relax and have fun outside of the sessions.

The Nook

Steve Jones — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:36:00 GMT

Barnes and Noble recently announced their new e-book reader, the Nook. It looks pretty cool, and in some ways I think it really blows past the Kindle. There is another reviews from Technology Review.

There are two big features that make me think this is a great new product that blows past the Kindle.

The first one is the lend feature. If you haven’t heard, with this you can “lend” your book to a friend to use not only on their Nook reader, but on their smartphone or PC/Mac. Any device that has a B&N reader can see the book for 14 days. That’s cool as I can give others an idea of what I recommend.

I know Amazon has the share among Kindles, but they devices have to be on the same account. I don’t necessarily want my wife on my account, or vice versa as I don’t want to see her books, or even manage a budget between us.

I don’t think this is a big deal, and I can’t see it costing lots of revenue. It’s more a way to create community and interest people. It also sounds good, which is important to ensuring people are happy with the device.

The second thing that I like is that it has wi-fi built in. I did find it interesting that Amazon is no longer using Sprint, but moving to ATT, which is the carrier for the nook as well. However ATT has horrible coverage where I am, and I constantly hear people complaining about coverage from them. So if that’s the case, and I can’t buy a book when I want, like from bed or in an airport, then wi-fi is a great second solution.

I like the idea of e-reading. I’m mostly using my iPhone to read for now. I would like to get a dedicated reader again at some point, mostly for the ease of reading in bright environments, and the tremendous battery life. However until I get some insurance or other coverage, and I have an easy way to get books from multiple sources, I’m not sure I want to invest in one.

Skipping SQL Connections

Steve Jones — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:24:12 GMT

I’ve never been to Las Vegas, and was looking forward to going for the first time this week for SQL Connections. SQLServerCentral is sponsoring a track and I was looking forward to speaking to a new group of people that doesn’t usually come to the PASS Summit.

That’s off now and it looks like I’m not meant for Vegas at this time. I have cancelled my trip, and won’t be attending the show.

I would like to go, I was planning on it, and slightly dreading turning around for another trip so soon. As late as Saturday afternoon, as I was driving back from the airport, returning from Seattle and the SQL PASS conference.

Then I got a call from my wife. I’d left her a message when I arrived in Denver, and as I got off the highway, my cell phone rang.

“Hi honey, glad you’re home from Seattle. I broke my arm.”

That was the welcome home for me. I immediately turned and headed to the hospital where I found my wife. She’s fine, in fact, more annoyed by the experience than hurt. She’s also more worried about the young colt she was working with than herself.

However with a spiral fracture of her forearm, and a hard splint until Wednesday, I can’t leave her alone. Between the need to feed horses, an older dog that needs help standing up, and kids, we aren’t confident that she could manage without hurting the fracture more.

She could manage, but she’d likely do too much, and turn what should be a simple fracture into something that needs surgery. That’s the big reason I need to be home.

So I’ll miss SQL Connections, a show that I’ve never been to. But I plan on going next year, and being prepped for a couple presentations. We’ve had bad luck with this trip, as another speaker also had to cancel due to medical issues with his family. I’ve learned that you need to be sure you have an extra presentation or two in your bag, just in case.

PASS Summit - David DeWitt Keynote

Steve Jones — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:29:54 GMT

Microsoft sent Dr. David DeWitt to do the last keynote of the PASS Summit. He's a technical fellow in the data and storage platform. He's looking forward to the future of SQL Server and is talking to future of technology and trends.

From 1 to 1000 MIPS is his talk.

His background, 32 years at the University of Wisconsin. He runs the Jim Gray Systems lab in Madison, with the idea of taking technology out of UW into the Microsoft product suite. It's not part of Microsoft Research, and has 3 faculty and 8 grad students.

Working on releases 1 and 2 of SQL Server Parallel Database Warehouse. Last year he talked about parallel database technology. The idea is to look at trends in hardware and then database system specialization in the next decade. I tend to agree with this and we might need to specialize with new database technology.

Let's go back to 1980. The VAX 11/780, 1MIPS, 1kb cache, 8MB memory, 80MB disk drives, 1MB/sec xfer all for $250k! This was the first 32 bit relational database. INGRES and Oracle were the main relational database vendors and the basic DBMS architecture is the same thing we use today.

However hardware is different. We now run around 2GIPS, 1MB caches on chip, 2GB/CPU RAM, and 800GB drives. Everything is 1,000x greater or more.

Disk Drives

If we look at transfer rates on disks, we're only about 65x improvement, and seek times are only about a 10x improvement. Quite a disparity.

1985, early benchmarks. 100TPS, 400 disk IOs/sec, with 14 drives. Roughly 30I IOs/sec per drive.

Go to 2009, we have 25,000TPS, 100,000 disk IOs/Sec, 330 drives with 300 IOs/sec equivalent!

So the 1000x improvement in CPUs has been almost negated by the 10X disk access/sec changes. That is amazing. And sobering.

Transfer Bandwidth/byte, a new metric. Dividing transfer rate by capacity, then you get .015 in 1980 drives, .0001 in today's drives. So the Dr. DeWitt sees drives as slower relatively. Hard to reconcile that in my little mind.

CPU Trends

1980 the VAXC had a single CPU, 8kb L1 cache, 6 cycles ot access memory. 10 cycles /instruction.

today we have multiple CPUs, 64kb private L! caches, 2-8MB shared L2 cache, 1 cycle/instruction. 2 cycles to access L1, 20 to access L2

What is the impact on DBMS performance. Looking at a DB2 on Linux, TPC-H queries on 10GB database and a 1GB buffer pool.

In looking at a CPU and where time is spent. Lots of time waiting for things, about 10% useful computation time. 50% of the time waiting on memory. Why? The L2 data cache is waiting on transfers. That is amazing.

Read 3 pages from disk, up to 9 L1 and L2 cache misses. An L2 cache miss can stall the CPU for up to 200 cycles.

An alternative physical layout is a column store. What does this mean? I wasn't sure this was a great idea when I read it last year, but I would recommend you read to understand. Now if we look at the cache misses, there's a difference. Same query we saw before now has many less cache misses. Less I/O is wasted.

In an example he gave, for a 10M row table. In a row store, for a simple query, 3 columns, you return 2GB of data and it takes 25 sec. A row stored only scans 280MB at 3.5 sec. That's amazing, though I'm not sure how useful this is for most of us. It's definitely built for data warehousing, and might not apply for OLTP loads.

Physical Representation

We have our row store, a column store, and hybrids. We could include an ID with the column as well. I know it's confusing, and I'm not giving enough detail, but it's confusing to me as well. This is probably in a paper, or series of papers somewhere. I'll try to find references.

Compression starts to work better because CPU is 1000x faster, but disks are 65x faster. So you spend the time doing decompression and it still works better. Some types that Dr. DeWitt talked about.

Run Length encoding, a good way to compress data. works well with sorted data.

Bit Vector encoding, another way to compress. Use bits to represent values if there are relatively few values. Combine this with RLE and increase compression.

Dictionary encoding - Create a dictionary for the values.

With a row store, you have different issues. You cannot run length compress in that store. Or not easily or well.

A column store scanner, to satisfy a query, is more complex. A much different path of working through a query. This is very interesting stuff, and very well explained.

However updates are an issue. No free lunch. The updates are hard and creates lots of work. Research is being done on how to make these more efficient, but it's a tough problem to solve.

There is more interesting stuff, but it's hard to relate. And I spent more time listening than typing. I'll write on this more, but it is interesting. There is work being done for SQL Server 10.5, and SQL Server 11 in this area. Some of this, the Vertipaq engine, is in SQL Server 10.5, which is SQL Server 2008 R2, I believe. Dr. DeWitt hinted at other things, but I'm not sure what will be used in future products.

Daniel Abadi (Yale) has a great technology blog. David DeWitt recommends him.

PASS Summit - DELL Keynote

Steve Jones — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:04:29 GMT

Note might be sparse here as it's not a great keynote. There's a lack of excitement, and enthusiasm from the speakers this week for keynotes. I've typically dreaded the vendor keynote because they work too hard to try and sell you something.

DELL is here to talk about SQL Server in the enterprise and specifically consolidation and configuration.

We're getting some ideas about configuration management, showing us types of data to track. This isn't worthy of a keynote. There is a good list of information, but it's not something that we need talked about in the morning session, and we certainly don't need it read to us.

Why do configuration management? You can learn how to classify systems for SLAs and support resources. It also gives you priority for DR.

Ay yi yi, this is almost painful. I do like technical information and not marketing, and this isn't a lot of marketing, but it is boring and uninspiring.

I quit, this just sucks. It's not worth reporting on, unless we go Mystery Science Theater 3000-style.

PASS Summit - Opening Remarks with Bill Graziano

Steve Jones — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:53:09 GMT

Bill, the Vice President of Marketing, opened the day with a few remarks about how to keep up with PASS. Then a tribute to Kevin Kline.

Kevin has been a part of PASS for 10 years, and it was great to see people recognizing his efforts. Wayne Snyder came up to say good bye to Kevin, the past President of PASS, after 10 years. An emotional moment, and Wayne broke up a little. I can relate to that and I'm not sure I'd be any better.

An award to Kevin for his service to PASS and he received a well deserved, standing ovation.

Our new directors, Thomas LaRock, Brian Moran, and Jerimaih Peschka, were noted on the stage. Our new executive committee is:

President Rushabh Mehta
Vice President of Finance Bill Graziano
Vice President of Marketing Rick Heiges
Past President Wayne Snyder

The European conference is scheduled for April in Neuss, Germany. It will be the 21-23rd, April, 2010.

The North American Summit is back in Seattle next year, November 8-11, 2010. If you're coming back to the Summit, the lowest price is available now, so if you can book it now, you'll save around $1000. http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/na2010.

The headquarters staff was recognized as well. They are a great group of people up in Vancouver that keep PASS running all year around. I certainly rely on them for a few things, and I think they're great. The most visible is Blythe Morrow (@blythemorrow) on Twitter, so if you have something to suggest or know, send them an email, or tweet Blythe.

Feedback

The way you change things at the Summit is with feedback. PASS is here for you as a user, so if there is something you want them to do, let them know. If there's something you liked, or disliked, about the Summit, fill out the surveys.

If you want to get the Summit on the East Coast, TELL PASS.

The speakers are also chosen partially based on the reviews that you give them. So if you enjoyed a session, be sure to let them know. If you didn't enjoy a session, give constructive criticisms.

Women in Technology Luncheon

Steve Jones — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:54:36 GMT

I've never attended this in the past, but I've wanted to. As the father of young girl I want to be sure that my daughter has the same opportunities as my sons in the career world. Supporting other women in technology just feels like something I should do.

The luncheon was a panel of 4 women, moderated by Wendy Patrick. Kathi Kellenburger, Jessica Moss, Cathi Rodgveller, and Lynn Langit participated, sharing their stories and backgrounds. From Kathi's inspiration from her own daughter to get started with Active Server Pages to Jessica providing a roll model for a friend's young girls, it's inspiring to hear them talk with a passion on how to interest young women in technology.

Cathy Rodgveller has started IGNITE, a group looking to inspire young women in the Seattle school districts. I think that exposing children to options, and getting them to just consider alternative careers is something we need to do more of. Cathy has also created other groups that help other minorities, empowering them to open their minds to other

We already have less math, science, and engineering students in the US than in the past, but the percentage of women is declining. That's disconcerting to me. I've enjoyed seeing more and more women coming to the PASS Summit every year, and becoming a larger proportion of the data professional population. I hope that it continues in the future.

Lynn Langit, author and BI professional, gave us ideas about how to grow our efforts. She asked everyone to tweet or text someone and show support for women in technology. Brian Kelley was my tweet since he's not here, he has a daughter, and I think he'd like this. Lynn donates a portion of her royalties from her BI book to DigiGirlz. If you need a BI book, that's a good reason to pick Lynn's among the others. Put your money where you mouth is.

Use your voice, engage with girls, is Lynn's message.

If there's one thing I'd learned in my life, it's the power of words. I write on a regular basis, and he feedback I get from so many of you is how I make you think. I hear how I inspire others to reconsider their viewpoint, to stop for a moment and think about things in a new way. Take the time to talk to a women, a girl, a minority and show them that they can do succeed in technology if they want to.

There is tremendous power in just talking about possibilities.

Breaking Stereotypes

How do you break the image? Cathy sees young women stuck with myths about working in technology. You have to work alone, be super smart, long hours, etc. They are misconceptions. Young women don't know what is involved, and we should get involved. Share your story.

Q&A

A few notes from the question and answer time.

Men constantly ask for things from Lynn, women don't (time, money, freebies, etc). Why? Women need to speak up and ask for help, support, etc.

Why women's participation in technology has fallen? Girls are not inspired by technology. They are not encouraged or supported in schools to get interested in technology. Is that true? I wonder. My children have had a number of "technology" teachers, though it was not programming or technical work. Cathy says IGNITE is very inexpensive to run, so it's worth bringing up to local schools. I'll pass it along to the technology teachers in my school district.

How does a man inspire a girl in technology? The panel talked about the importance of men participating, but it's sad that they didn't give any ideas for men.

That's true, and different groups need to help other groups. Women should focus on women. Minorities on minorities. Technologists focus on technology. It takes a small effort from many people, each of us focusing in our own area, the effect changes. If we say that everyone should focus on everyone, there is no focus.

Education is the key. Teach young people about many ideas, a variety of thoughts, teach them to think for themselves.

PASS Summit - Tom Casey

Steve Jones — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:09:07 GMT

Today's keynote was from Tom Casey, called Bringing Greater agility to your business.

The number for the day is 20%. Fewer than 20% of the people that we help every day as data professionals, have access to BI tools and technology. I wonder if that's true. In many places I'd think it was lower, but I do agree with Tom that we have to do better. We have to find ways to better bring data to our customers.

And educating them. Helping them not only to see data and use tools, but also how to understand patterns in data. That requires some business and knowledge growth from us as well.

Microsoft continues to work on traditional BI tools and technology, and continues to increase their investment. They also support PASS, with 2 dedicated BI tracks and over 50 BI sessions. 31% of the people attending chose DW and BI as their tracks. It's good to keep in mind that Microsoft cancelled their BI conference, so they have sent a lot of people here. I hope they continue to support BI at PASS, even if they revive their own conference.

Or maybe PASS would sponsor a BI conference?

A customer success story from Premier Bankcard, 9th largest M/C issuer in the US. They're likely a good BI customer, needing to analyze lots of data and understand trends. They supposedly feed information from the data warehouse to all employees. That's like saying all users receive information from the financial system because they get a pay stub.

As much as I like the idea of showcasing customers, I hate that things are hyped up and unrealistic. We believe in MS technology. You don't need to hype, BS, or excite us. We're already there. Give us real details and reasons along with realistic issues that have to have occurred.

The MS vision, BI for everyone. It's good that they're recognizing that there are all kinds of information, stored in all kinds of formats. And you can't force it all to be in databases or cubes. We have to find a new way to bring information together in new ways, and giving that power to more users.

Are you THAT GUY?

The DIY guy, the guy, or gal, that needs to get things done. You assemble the information yourself, in Access or Excel. You build an application that's effective.

And it's done fast.

And as more people start to want your data, because it works, your application becomes a problem. It doesn't scale in Access or Excel.

It IT we've tried to squash that guy too often. We complain about them, but they're effective. Microsoft I think is giving up on fighting this guy and instead embrace him and give him more tools. I agree with that, and PowerPivot is a tool designed to work with this guy.

Gemini has become PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for Sharepoint. Amir Netz, who is a great speaker, is doing a PowerPivot demo. I saw some of this yesterday in a press briefing, and talked to a TAP customer whose data they are using for the demo. It's pretty cool.

One very interesting thing in the Powerpoint demo is the amount of compression they get. I saw 101,000,000 rows in an Excel, PowerPivot table. It's 20+GB raw, but it's compressed to 133MB. It sorts and scrolls fast, faster than it used to take for 65k rows. The demo is impressive. I might need to get Red Gate's Data Generator and give this a try and see if it really works on my desktop.

The way it works is there is an instance of SSAS running in-process in Excel. I hope it scales well, and doesn't crush the average desktop machine when it's running Outlook, etc.

There are some enhancements to the formula engine in PowerPivot, using Excel type expressions, but bringing more BI type functionality. The formulas now work with tables, not just scalars.

The thing I worry about is the refresh/recalculate of Excel being used to requery data, or recalculate things when someone hits a button or opens an XLSX. That could cause quite a load on the system. It's a good idea in practice, but I start to see the potential mesh interconnections of these XLSXes with more systems. It could cause more problems.

The idea is that users will integrate with Sharepoint and upload their spreadsheets there. There are new skins to present the documents in new ways instead of just a list of names. That is cool. Eye candy for the information worker. Not a bad thing, but I can see a meeting to decide what view to present to people.

One thing I saw yesterday, and it very cool, is a set of geographical controls for visualizing data. I haven't needed these often, but when I have, it's been hard to visualize things without a good control. And cumbersome to set one up. That is a nice enhancement.

When you upload the XLSX to Sharepoint, the application uses an instance of Analysis Services on the server. That's good and bad. It gives us something to manage, but the application appears to be automatically built to power the PowerPivot functionality. That's scary for IT and I don't know what it means, but I have the utmost confidence that things will not work smoothly and DBAs will still have jobs.

The thing that it seems to me is that you have to go 2010 all the way. Office, Sharepoint, SQL Server 2008 R2. And it's a lot of 1.0 technology.

I wonder how many people are willing to do this? I did speak with one of the TAP customers at breakfast and he likes it. It has worked well for him, and he doesn't seem to be too worried. How much of that is NDA and he can't talk about issues, I don't know. How much of it is that he's been dunked in the MS kool-aid? Who knows, but I think that it must be working well for him to be willing to share this information.

There is more information at www.powerpivot.com and @powerpivot.

PASS Summit 2009 - Opening Remarks

Steve Jones — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:07:47 GMT

Opening remarks on day 2 of the Summit come from Rushabh Mehta, vice president of finance. Rushabh is giving us some more insight into how the money works with PASS. Even though it's a non-profit, PASS needs funding to survive, a good portion of which comes from the conference.

A commitment to financial transparency, something missing in previous years, is something that PASS says they're working on. I think the 2008 Summit was a huge step forward in presenting information to members. There's a page at pass, www.sqlpass.org/governance, available to members once logged in with reports of the financial statements.

The overview for 2010, fiscal year.

projected revenue of $3.2m
This represents a 15% reduction in revenues
40% growth in community spending
Investments in infrastructure and HQ
67% reduction in IT expenses
European event was profitable

No more details on that, but I'll dig in more later.

Rushabh is promoting people to interact and engage with PASS. I think that's great, and I'd like to see more people go to local user groups and network with them. You never know when it will pay off, you might learn something, or better yet, teach somebody something else. The Denver group has a great meeting every month, thanks in large part to Marc Beacom and the rest of the leaders. But it's really the 30 or 40 people that come every month that make it a success. You don't have to come every month, but try for once a year.

Volunteers are the lifeblood of PASS. I haven't always been helping much with PASS, but I'll be looking to do a few things next year. I know not everyone can help out, but consider it. And at the very least, thank a volunteer that you see walking around at the conference.

PASSion Award

The PASSion Award is an annual recognition by PASS that is given to volunteers that really have contributed a lot to the organization. Last year, my good friend, Kathi Kellenburger received the award. This year we have a few people being recognized.

Tim Ford, @sqlagentman, is being awarded for his efforts as a volunteer, doing a lot of work and helping make the 24 hours of PASS

Grant Fritchey (@gfritchey) is also being recognized for his efforts with the SQL Server Standard. He's the driving force behind getting that publication back on it's feet.

Amy Lewis has helped with the virtual chapters on BI. She's split the groups into more focus and

Jacob Sebastian, another friend and well known member of the SQLServerCentral community, is being recognized for his works in India, helping to promote education and PASS on the other side of the world.

The 2009 award is actually 2: one for North America and one for international efforts.

Charlie Hanania is the winner for the international award. He leads the Swiss chapter and managed the European conference.

Allen Kinsel is the North American winner for 2009. He's done a lot as a volunteer for the program committee, the volunteer committee and the nomination committee. I've been following his tweets as he reviewed abstracts and completed things for PASS, and was amazed at how much work he did.

Congrats to both of these individuals for their efforts.

The To Do List

Women in Technology luncheon, MVPs signing books (buy the Deep Dives book and support War Child), meet the board of directors at a Q&A, and finally Microsoft sponsoring the night's event at Gameworks.

PASS Summit 2009 - Ted Kummert

Steve Jones — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:09:53 GMT

After Bob Muglia, Ted Kummert came on stage. He's the senior VP of the server tools division and works for Bob. He talked about how life has changed for him at PASS and then gave us his top 5 to be at PASS

PASS Continues to thrive and grow - Largest gathering of SQL Server professionals.
Take your questions to the source - I completely agree here. Lots of MS people come. Ted had the SQL Server product team stand up in their horse-present-brown shirts.
We have Wayne and Rushabh - Images of last year with the PASS leadership coming on stage on a Harley and a Vespa.
Work Hard and Play hard - Microsoft has rented GameWorks for Wed night.
Building Skills and Knowledge on the #1 database - OK , it's sucking up, but it's listed as the fastest growing db platform and #1 in units.

Great adoption of SQL Server 2008 in the last year. I'd love to know more about numbers here.

"SQL Server is a great thing to be a part of" - Ted Kummert.

The Vision

Microsoft rolled out a vision of how to fit SQL Server into the Information Platform Vision. So moving beyond data, to now only store, but gain insight and also use the data. The vision also seeks to get users more at the center of what the product needs to do.

The four pillar strategy

Mission Critical Platform - It has to work.
Empower IT - We can't continue to spend 60% of IT dollars on just making the business run.
Pervasive Insight
Dynamic Development

Mission Critical Platform - Quality has to be there. By all measures, SQL Server 2008 is the highest quality release ever. An order of magnitude less fixes in SS2K8 SP1 than SS2K5 SP1. But more than code quality, is the engineering. Things like slipstreaming in SPs and SP uninstall.

SQL Server is also very secure, a great track record as far as security items.

Lastly, it's also scalable. Working with partners to deliver reference configurations and information to quickly and easily deploy large systems. Fast Track 2.0 announced today with IBM as a new partner. New scale up is now to 256 logical CPUs on Windows 2008 R2. Is logical under dual or quad cores? I wonder.

A customer reference is one stage. Priti Desai of First American Title Insurance comes on stage to show how one of her mission critical applications uses SQL Server. Their application, if down, can cost them US$1million / hour. That is critical!

They upgraded to SQL Server 2008. Why? Partitioning and data compression were items listed as reasons to upgrade. Lots of blah, blah, save money, run better, etc. The standard story. Not a great reference in my opinion. Twitter grabbed my interest after a couple minutes.

Empowered IT - Some concepts that came about from conversations with customers.

single unit of deployment
integrated policy
Visibility and control of the environment
resource optimization

Data Tier Application Component as a new way to deploy applications. Dan Jones came out to show a demo of a feature complete build of deployment. This is after an early release demo of this last year.

SSMS 2008 R2, on screen. A new "utility explorer" that allows us to create a control point. That's the instance that is like a central management for a "cloud" of servers. After a control point, you start to enroll other instances. These are instances that are managed through policy, as a group. You can set thresholds for what are under- or over-utilized server instances.

Data Tier Application for existing applications? The demo shows taking an "application" or existing database, and register it as a DTA. A wizard creates a model of the logins, users, etc. in the database and stores meta data about the application/database.

There's a change request for a table. Dan sticks a new column in the table and saves it. Then changes polices for the application, deploy only to X64, TCP enabled, etc. The multiple changes are then "built" into a solution. You can click "upgrade" and it generates the "ALTER" scripts for us. That is cool, if it's easy to track/save/store/VCS.

Demo complete, things went relatively smoothly.

Dynamic Development - Key tenets:

common way to express entity relationships
bring together producers and consumers of data
interoperability of languages and platforms.

These are the ideas that will help leverage things with the SQL Server platform. The changes coming in .NET 4 are here to support this and we get another demo. This time VS 2010, latest build. It builds on the DAC pack from the last demo. It's imported into the product.

Based on domain driven design. This is getting out of my area, but he is showing the classes for entities that you've built. This can be good or bad, depending on how you design the application and database. You can turn off class generation in VS, which is probably a good thing.

Pablo builds classes by hand, but I'm losing interest. This is becoming a bit of a long keynote, especially with a lack of code and lots of talking about how/why changes were made.

VS demos on designing classes and deploying them is B-O-R-I-N-G

ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

StreamInsight

A complex event processing engine. Acts on information in real time for large streams of data. It will release with SQL Server 2008 R2, and while I don't understand it, it looks cool. It will have a programming surface, a nice new term.

Some examples of how it's working. NFL, using Silverlight, allows you to click cameras and see different views. The Streaminsight piece grabs the click stream in real time to see what people look at.

Another example, processing sensor data from oil industry and make real time changes to something. About as general an example as you can give and not provide information that helps us understand what it is.

Pervasive Insight

One of those great terms. We want an answer to some question in the data. This is about shortening the loop for getting answers. MS is looking to efficiently manage the information and align the systems. Master Data Management is what they are working on here. Self-service BI and then share and collaborate, meaning more piss-poor Sharepoint, is their vision.

I think we have good ideas here, but I'm not sure the implementation from the MS perspective is a great one. The need to sell units seems to override the need to slow down and build better, more intuitive and effective solutions. And build more polished, properly documented products. I'm thinking about the issues with Sharepoint here, and maybe SP2010 will fix things that haven't been done well in SP 2007.

Amir Netz is on for a demo. This has been a long keynote, but I have always enjoyed hearing Amir speak. He's one of the few I've recommended as a must see, regardless of the topic. The demo is here in looking at managing data in terms of policies and if the data is being properly used. Data quality and validation are shown.

A data warehouse monster: 20 processing nodes, each with 20 processing threads. Very cool. 60million rows added to 10TB data warehouse in seconds. 60Billion rows in total existing in there. If that's true, it's pretty cool. A report was built, and all nodes peak out, scanning the rows. A query aggregated 2billion rows in about 8 sec.

Showing off Report Builder 3.0, grabbing parts of other reports to assemble onto a new report. Also some geographical information components you can use. That's cool. Often wanted some map controls to mess around with.

The End is near: about time.

This was too long, and it lost a little focus near the end. Too much "trying to impress" the people. However a few interesting items given, new scale and features in SQL 2008 R2.

SQL Azure is feature complete, and is a complete RDBMS platform. That is interesting. They'll start billing for it in 1/1/2010. So test it now while it's free.

One more demo..noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

It shows a decent SSMS like interface for SQL Azure tables and objects. That's good. Shows some management and integration of local databases with cloud databases.

OK, I'm done.

PASS Summit - Bob Muglia

Steve Jones — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:00:19 GMT

President of server tools at Microsoft, Bob Muglia, he overseas Windows Server, Systems Center, Hyper-V, and of course, SQL Server. Bob was the product manager when SQL Server was announced by Microsoft in 1988 and actually brought a box on stage of the Ashton-Tate/Microsoft SQL Server 1.0. I never used that product, but I did use the product a couple years later, in 1991 as the Sybase port, when it was Microsoft SQL Server v4.2 (on OS/2).

Bob's talk is talking about how Microsoft has grown up, and is scaling up. There was a rack on stage that was mostly full. Looked like 7 4u boxes, but Bob says it's a single server, so I'm guessing lots of disks in there.

The demo shows 64 CPUs being used. There's a workload that's almost pegging the CPU. An application controls the work being done, and the CPUs. When increased to 128 CPUs, a new high, the workload goes down. That's impressive, but we know there's more. Bob's hinted that 192 CPUs are now possible for SQL Server 2008 R2. The workload increases to peg the box, but then the CPUs are raised to 192CPUs and the workload comes down.

It's staged, but it's still impressive at the high end. If you have a big workload, and a big, big checkbook, you can go to 192 CPUs. Not many people can get there, but I do think that this will mean that the 64, 32, 16CPU boxes will come down in price.

A new benchmark world record, TPC-E 2012 tpsE, an overall record and a price/performance record with x64 and IA64 Windows and SQL Server. In the data warehouse space, the record on Windows is now TPC-H 3TB warehouse, 102,778QphH. With Microsoft's own Dynamics product, with 20,000 used, there is sub-second response. Marketing numbers, but they are still pushing the limits.

One very interesting note on the release of SQL Server 2008 might have slipped by. The press release, and the slide of the benchmarks shows a date available of 5/6/2010. I wonder if that is the expected release for the product.

As memory, flash disks become more prevalent, the data professionals become more important. I tend to agree with that. So many people have worried about easier SQL Server means less need for DBAs. I think it means more opportunities because we can do more things that have greater impact. Bob mentions he sees our role expanding because data is so critical to organizations.

Shifts in management

Data centers, traditionally are utilized < 15%, but they are well known ways to manage large numbers of servers. Virtualization is one of these. Easier management, higher flexibility in data centers and reducing costs. The database server is one of the last types of servers to be virtualized, but it will come.

Consistent and coherent access to data is important for all applications.

A demo of Hyper-V, Win 2K8 R2, Virtual Machine Manager 2K8, showing live migration of a SQL Server. Moving a virtual SQL server from one physical box to the next. The demo shows a live load on the server by running a stored procedure against it. We can see it running in the background as an app. By selecting "migrate" and then "next" and then "move" the virtual machine moves. The stored procedure continues running, with no interruption to the app running the stored proc.

Bob talks about Hyper-V being close to VMWare in performance. However I've seen people report performance issues with VMWare, so I'm not sure that this is a big deal.

Clouds

Private clouds, a way that can provide a computing resource. I like the idea of clouds inside a company. A computing resource that you deploy do. Bob mentions this is a way to decrease management costs and scale out an application as needed. The example given is the "giving" application at Microsoft, a way for employees to determine charitable contributions once a year. There's an elastic computing capability that allows the app to live on 2 computers most of the year. But when needed, at the once a year time when it's pushed to employers, it can grow to 24 computers for a few days.

This is a good way for elastic computing to live. Grow resources as they are needed. Microsoft is looking to have companies build private clouds inside their organization first. I agree with that, learn to scale these things to 10s of machines. Once we know that, then perhaps public clouds are more likely. That's for businesses that need to keep their data secure.

SQL Azure is being used inside Microsoft. I'd love to see detailed case studies, with code, from them on how this is being used and in what places. The idea is good for limited scope items. Or maybe it's much further advanced than I'm aware of. I think I have some research to do.

The role of the DBA

The data we manage is at the center of our organizations. The opportunity for DBAs is to take our skill sets and leverage them to solve new problems. Perhaps problems that you couldn't solve before, or didn't have time to solve.

I think that's the "spin", but it's also a truth. If you are spending time managing the details, the minutiae of keeping a server running, you are making a mistake.

PASS Summit 2009 - Wayne Snyder

Steve Jones — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:23:28 GMT

The opening remarks of the first day are typically from the President of PASS. Wayne Snyder, the outgoing president started with a welcome, and then some facts and figures on the conference. From the PASS Press release:

46 countries
2,998 registrations

However that number lists 2,200 conference registrations, and 798 pre- or post-conference registrations. I think that of that 798, probably 798 of those people are attending the conferences, so it's a bit of double counting. I think that includes the Microsoft people as well, so the actual number of people and DBAs that are here is less. But it's still a great attendance level. Overall the attendance is down 9%, which is great. I would have thought it was much lower than that, so kudos to PASS Marketing for the efforts they put into promoting the conference.

The big reason I like the Summit in Seattle is this:

over 400 Microsoft SQL Server employees are here.

That's a lot of people, and you won't get that many Microsoft people at many events, maybe not even TechEd! I know people want to have the Summit on the East Coast, and I can understand that, but I also like the Microsoft presence. I'd really like to see a poll or vote of some sort on this. If enough people want the conferences

24 Hours of PASS

24 one hour sessions, running continuously around the clock. The event was great and it was one of the highlights in PASS history, at least in my opinion. Congrats and incredible props to Rick Heiges for putting that together. I participated, broadcasting live from the basement at the dkRanch. A few facts:

50,123 registrations
70 countries
3.524 people

I had a great time, watched a couple sessions with great information in there and I hope that it happens again next year.

The SQL Server Standard

This was my baby, or at least Andy's, Brian's, and mine. We hatched this idea in 2003, on a trip I took to Orlando. We all met up with our families, and sitting at a table in a food court, my daughter asleep in a stroller nearby, the major blackout of the power system in the Northeast having taken place that Saturday evening and we sat there debating what type of magazine or journal we could launch.

We started it in conjunction with PASS and published it for 3 years. After the sale of SQLServerCentral, it became too much of an effort to continue, and we turned the entire publication over to PASS.

PASS stopped publishing it because of the cost of mailing, and I completely understand. The postage cost was over 50% of the total cost for each issue. That's a lot of money, and I understand the decision.

But it's back, under the guidance of Grant Fritchey and Andy Warren. The first article was recently published, and look for more coming. If you want to write for the Standard, send an abstract in.

The Summit

There's a Q&A session with the board of directors of PASS later this week. It's in Room 6E on Wednesday, 4:30-6:15. I'd encourage people to attend it. It's your chance to talk to the board and express your opinion.

If you don't want to do it in person, and I understand that, there's a suggestion box outside by the PASS booth. Fill something out and drop it in the box.

It's a great Summit that's planned, and apparently 40% of the attendees are new to the Summit for the first time. Words of wisdom from Wayne: No one should be a stranger.

So say hi to someone new, and if you are new, stop someone and ask them questions, or say hi, or ask advice about what is fun to do here in Seattle at the PASS Summit.