Hello all - here’s my latest vblog entry where I discuss the online resources that I use when trying to research various SQL Server topics. I hope you find these resources as helpful as I do!
Thanks,
Kevin
I’m not sure what the marketing department is planning over at Quest Software. But I thought I’d take a moment to tell you about some new, and free, beta releases that are of interest to SQL Server professionals. I also want to point out that I always want to hear your feedback about any Quest product and will make sure that it gets to the right people in the company so that your feedback can be addressed immediately.
So what’s new?
Toad for SQL Server 4.0 Beta: This release, the final beta drop for v4.0, features an all-new UI with lots of process improvements.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/toad_ss_beta/message/3377
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/toadss/message/3434
http://www.toadsoft.com/toadsqlserver/toad_sqlserver_beta.htm
Toad for Data Analysis 2.0 Beta: This release includes lots of new enhancements and added features.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ToadforDataAnalysis/message/2216
http://tda.inside.quest.com/thread.jspa?threadID=7206&tstart=0
http://www.toadsoft.com/watson/beta.html
And don’t forget about Quest’s free SQL Server discovery tool that enables you to find SQL Servers anywhere within your enterprise, the SQL Server Discovery Wizard.
I look forward to hearing what you think soon!
-Kev
Hello, this is Kevin Kline - join me tomorrow, along with Quest Domain Expert Brent Ozar and SQL Server MVP Ron Talmage, for a roundtable discussion on SQL Server consolidation and virtualization. We’ll discuss a variety of issues that seem to come up constantly in the discussion forums - How are your consolidated / virtualized SQL Servers going to be used? Are they running production environments with strict SLAs and heavy workloads? Do SQL Server licensing costs make a big difference for your organization? What about SQL Server management costs? Will performance troubleshooting be an issue?
The webcast is tomorrow, Thursday July 30th, at 8:00 AM PST / 11:00 AM EST. Register for the webcast here.
I hope to see you there tomorrow!
While I’m recovering from surgery, I’ve been thinking about what makes a technology poster worth putting up on your wall?
As I walked around TechEd last week, there was no shortage of posters available for all sorts of technologies. Some were mostly diagrams without many words, while others were almost entirely verbal. Even among the SQL Server vendors and at the Microsoft SQL Server pavilion you could find several different posters. Quest Software (my employer) had two posters out - one with a quick description of all of the DMVs in SQL Server 2005/2008 and with a description and syntax for all of the system stored procedures.
My main criterion in deciding whether to put up a poster is whether it offers a quick look-up on information that I’d otherwise have to spend a long time thumbing through manuals (either physically or electronically) to find the information I need. So what’s your main priorities in a) whether you even keep a poster, and b) whether you put one up on the wall? What are some topics worth putting onto posters that you’ve always wanted to see in print?
Many thanks! I look forward to your feedback,
-Kev
I just wanted to take a second and point out that SQL Server 2008 RC0 is now available. That means that your going to see a ton of marketing around new features and you’re going to have to decide whether or not those features not only justify an upgrade to SQL Server 2008, but what version, standard or enterprise, you should upgrade to. It’s a good idea to start looking now. If you’re a decision maker in this process carefully analyze what each feature can bring to your environment. You might be able to get away with the standard edition and save a bunch of money for your organization. On the other hand, features like transparent data encryption, table partitioning and the resource governor might be enough to justify the cost difference. Check out thecomparison:
SQL Server 2008: Click here…
For those still moving to SQL Server 2005:
SQL Server 2005: Click here…
-Dave
Be sure to check these out:
White Paper: Security Overview for Database Administrators 2008.
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/wp-sql-2008-security.aspx
For some reason, the title of this blog post makes me grin because it evokes a mental image of one guy trying to comically strangle another guy. But I digress…
Speaking at a user group meeting recently, an attendee asked whether the mirroring process had any capability to speed up or slow down its workload according to the amount of work waiting on it. I cast around for an answer to this and my friend, Kalen Delaney, already had the answer. She already has an answer for most any question on SQL Server, but again I digress. She got her answer from Peter Byrne, a Microsoft program manager and member of the SQL Server Storage Engine team.
Peter says…”There is a throttling heuristic used by mirroring to try to keep the backlog from getting too large on the mirror. Essentially, at commit time SQL Server may pause briefly if it determines the REDO queue on the mirror is getting large enough that failover time would be significantly affected.”
You can find more details about this process in the white paper:
And while we’re at it, don’t forget to investigate Kalen’s new DVD at http://sqlblog.com/blogs/kalen_delaney/archive/2008/01/24/did-you-know-my-dvd-is-now-orderable.aspx#4722. Not only is it a great value at any price with fantastic content, it’s only $19.95 plus $3 for S/H, which, when you think of it is incredibly cheap. Taking a MOC (Microsoft Official Curriculum) class is measured in the thousands of dollars. Kalen’s content, which is some of the best available, is so affordable!
There’s a lot of talk at the moment that Amazon is forcing self-publishers to use its own publishing centers in order to stay listed with the powerhouse Internet sales site. For example, this blog post Has Amazon Gone Mad by Rick Jelliffe rather aptly describes the situation. The Writer’s Weekly first broke the story here, but it’s now been taken up by major media such as the Wall Street Journal. Blogger M. David Peterson points out that there are alternatives - simply print enough copies ahead of time and ship them to the Amazon printing centers.
This certainly isn’t the death knell of publishing. But it is a telling sign. When I first started writing books, an author could reasonably expect to sell the first printing of their book, probably about 5000 books. This was usually enough sales to cover the advance that the publisher paid them and maybe a bit extra to cover a celebratory round of beers with his/her buddies. If the book was good and the the stars were in proper alignment, the author would be lucky to get addition printings of their book out the door and actually make a little money on the project. Nowadays, it seems like the first printing of a new title is only around 3000 and fewer books seem to be ascending to the level of “strong seller”.
Of course, there is always a place for titles like Word 2007 for Dummies. Those sort of everygreen titles will always sell. But it appears that the more niche your content is, the worse it will do as a book. The obvious reason for this is the Internet. Why would someone spend $40 for a book on SQL Server query tuning (as an example, I’m not knocking any specific book), when you could simply subscribe to the RSS feeds at sites like SQLblog, SQLMag, or SQL-Server-Performance and get nearly as much content? For that matter, the power of a good Google search (and not Windows Live Search, imo) enables you to pull valuable content from all three of these sites in short order. Not only is your search more taylored to your specific needs, it’s also more likely to be up-to-date with the latest versions, service packs, and nuances.
Authors like me are also concerned because the immediate alternative that comes to mind is writing and publishing an e-book. However, e-books seem to hold even less promise no than in years past. At least when you buy a book, you have a physical object that you own. You can take it on a plane and read it during that “turn off all electronic devices” stage of the flight. You can take it to the bathroom. You can share it with your team mates at work (hopefully, not right after taking it to the bathroom). E-books, though, have all the limitations of a book with none of the advantages of the internet.
I believe that as the hard-print media (book publishers, magazine publishers, newsletters, journals, and newspapers) continue to see shrinking audiences, the key to survival is tapping in to blogging and expert opinion. For example, the New York Times is doing extremely well with their Freakonomics blog, based upon the eponymous book (and a personal favorite of mine).
I read a lot of blog posts - a LOT. Sometimes it’s interesting to sit back and evaluate all of the reading that I’m doing to try to glean ways of improving my efficiency. One thing that has enormously improved my efficiency is installing a Google plug-in RSS reader. Now, all the blogs that I read come into one sidebar where I can easily keep track of what’s new.
So here are some of the posts I’ve been reading in the last couple days primarily covering SQL Server and also my other interests to a lesser degree:
http://sqlcat.com/whitepapers/default.aspx - The SQL CAT (Customer Advisory Team) are simply awesome.
http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/bobb/2008/03/04/FeatureSynergyInSQLServer2008.aspx - Bob Beauchemin’s blog is always a wonderful site for great new information. This particular article talks about the interplay of PowerShell and SSMS, which I’m trying to get up to speed on.
http://blogs.msdn.com/dtjones/archive/2008/03/07/getting-started-with-powershell.aspx - Dan Jone’s nice entry on getting started with PowerShell.
http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/ssqanet/archive/2008/03/04/pre-order-the-kalen-delaney-sql-server-internals-course-on-dvd.aspx - Kalen has been an expert in SQL Server since before it was a Microsoft product. This DVD is very much worth it. It’s actually really cheap considering how much information it contains.
http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/2008/03/05/TechNetRadioInterviewWithPaulAndKimberlyOnSQLServer2008Part1.aspx - Kimberly Tripp was the first person I ever took a SQL Server class from. Her content has always been top-tier and now that she and Paul are working together, it’s only gotten better.
http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2008/03/05/how-it-works-sqliosim-checksums.aspx - SQLIOSim is very useful for stress testing, but notoriously hard to interpret the results. (I wrote about this free tool some months ago in my SQL Server Magazine column, Tool Time.) This blog post from the PSS team helps you decifer checksum error messages that might appear in the SQLIOSim log.
http://blogs.msdn.com/benjones/archive/2008/03/05/store-your-data-in-the-cloud.aspx - Okay, so Microsoft has plans to allow you to host your SQL Server data in the cloud. That means that small businesses (or small teams inside of big businesses) can easily pop up SQL Server without the infrastructure or management headaches. I’m not sure how much traction this will get, but it shows that Microsoft now considers Google to be its biggest competitor IMO.
http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlperf/ - I was intrigued by a posting from the SQL Server Performance Engineering team that not only did SQL Server 2008 launch at February party for Windows 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, it launched with exceptionally good TPC-E numbers. This surprised me because, afaik, there’s still a lot of debug code in the CTPs. I know this because my own TPC-C test were disappointing. So I was wondering what the secret sauce was so that they could post strong numbers with a straight face. I haven’t yet read the TPC disclaimers, but rest assured that I will soon.
http://blogs.technet.com/wardpond/archive/2008/03/06/are-you-paying-to-read-this-post-you-don-t-have-to.aspx - I like to keep up with what Ward Pond is up to and, at the moment, he’s ticked off at a variety of websites that are aggregators for other people’s content, including his own. These websites charge monthly fees, but often create very little of their own content, instead repackaging what other people have written. This is what my Google RSS reader does for free.
https://blogs.msdn.com/sqlserverstorageengine/archive/2007/02/14/wow-lots-of-blogs-from-the-sql-product-team.aspx - I always go back to this web page from time to time to make sure that I’m checking in on all of the SQL Server team blogs. Right now, I’m making sure that all of the blogs with RSS feeds are in my reader so that I don’t have to go out and pull down their latest postings manually.
http://statisticsio.com/ - This is a new (to me at least) blog from Jason Massie that I found to be fun and interesting. I think the SQL All Stars competition is what caught my eye.
http://searchsqlserver.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid87_gci1296396,00.html?track=sy200&asrc=RSS_RSS-3_200 - I feel like I never seem to know enough about how the SQL language and XML interact on SQL Server. This is a good article by Michelle Gutzait examining XML on SQL Server, compared to simply using VARCHAR(MAX).
http://benchmarkfactory.inside.quest.com/index.jspa - I use Benchmark Factory (from my employer, Quest Software) to do my large-scale SQL Server testing. I was on the discussion forum reading some tips for doing a 3000 concurrent user TPC-C test.
And now for something completely different, I’m a big fan of the book Freakonomics and the accompanying blog hosted by the New York Times. In this book (and on their blog), the authors look to interprete the data as it really is, rather than the data as we wish it meant. The results are sometimes shocking and always interesting (social conservatives beware). In this particular blog post (http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/when-journalists-gripe/), they point to a website where journalists gripe about being a journalist. I was interested in this because I think old world journalists today are what icemen were in the 1920’s, on the verge of extinction. So I’m curious to see what’s happening in their world.
I’m also very concerned about the current state of the economy, which has been brewing for quite a long time now, and the dire straights we’re now in:
http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/3/7/63218/05713/729/471169
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iwL8pyStPKCF3LSCswXmM4jrhyygD8V8724G0
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN2862827920080229
http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2008/03/03/its-so-much-worse-than-you-think.aspx
I hope you find one or two of these posts of value, as I did.
Enjoy,
-Kev
I’m not sure whether I should be suprised, disturbed, or complacent. But this morning, I was greeted by a couple major acquisitions in our overall market segment of Database and Application systems.
First off, Oracle has made another major acquisition, this time of BEA Systems. BEA is a major provider of JAVA-based middleware technologies and service-oriented architectures (SOA). This move shores up Oracle’s middleware offering and goes a long way towards giving the 2nd largest software maker a more comprehensive set of product offerings to compete with the largest software maker, Microsoft. I’m not really surprised by this move and feel like it makes good sense for Oracle to gain ground in this space. The product lines are complimentary, even synergistic, and the acquisition allows it to gain on competitors like Microsoft and IBM.
In other news, I was a bit more surprised to learn that Sun Microsystems has acquired MySQL in a deal valued at around $1B. MySQL had been a major threat to the low end of the Microsoft SQL Server stack for quite some time. Even more threatening, imo, was MySQL’s ability to rally a strongly devoted community to help drive the open-source code base. However, I’m not too sure about this move. Sun has a wide range of hardware and software products, and has had a rocky road at several points in the past. Can a company with such a wide, even diffused focus enable a database product to shine? Tim O’Reilly, one of my heros, seems to think so in his blog commentary. He believes “The acquisition is also a great fit because Sun has staked its future on open source, releasing its formerly proprietary crown jewels, including Solaris, Java, and the Ultra-Sparc processor design”. I’ll reserve judgement, personally, on the situation but feel like there’s great opportunity and great risk in this move for MySQL.
If you’re wondering why any of this should matter to a died in the wool SQL Server person, I encourage you to take a look at Linchi Shea’s article on “Checking out the Competition“. Linchi makes the great point that database platform vendors often try to foist off their latest features as new ideas, when in fact they’ve been around in other products for year. So it’s always good for a SQL Server person to know what the competition is up to because it makes you a better SQL Server profession.
And finally, since I’m talking about broad trends, I really enjoyed Shashank Tiwari’s article about dropping backward compatibility. Although his discussion is about Java, I think he makes a very interesting point - that by carrying very heavy loads of backward compatibility features, we limit or even halt the ability of a product to evolve in directions. I don’t believe we’ve reached this point with SQL Server yet. But I feel like we’re starting to see a number of new “dead-end routes” for SQL Server, particularly with CLR and LINQ, that may in the end wind up being evolutionary deadweight for the database platform. Undoubtedly, CLR has very valuable use-cases and LINQ might too. But the resistance to these feature sets is quite strong throughout many enterprises, possibly resulting in major areas of investment by the SQL Server development team for what turns out to be, in an evolutionary metaphor, vestigial organs.
Thoughts are welcome! Cheers,
-Kevin