On Wednesday I’ll be presenting at the San Gabrial Valley .NET User Group.  I’ll be giving my SQL Service Broker presentation.

Then this weekend at the SoCal Code Camp I’ll be giving three presentations.  The first one is Reading the SQL Server Execution Plan, the second is SQL Server Indexing for the Client Developer and the third is Storage for the DBA.

Feel free to download the slide decks ahead and time.

Denny

Before you can choose a multi-pathing software you need to understand what the multi-pathing does.  When you connect your server to the storage array using the redundant network design that I’ve prevsouly talked about you will have four paths between the storage array and the server.  Without any multi-pathing software the server would see four copies of each volume on the server.  So if you presented one LUN to the server, you would see that presented to the server as four drives on the server.  You could then assign each one a different drive letter, but you would then need to manually change the drive letters around if a path failed.  Because each path is its own drive letter at the server level you don’t get the ability to use more than one path at a time.

When you use multi-pathing software the software sits as a software package installed on the server which combines the multiple paths to the storage into a single volume which you can access.  This allows for automatic failover between the paths.  The higher end multi-pathing software will allow you to use those paths in an Active/Active configuration where other mulit-pathing software will only allow for an Active/Passive configuration.

When working with these multiple paths you need to remember that the storage array will only allow traffic to a LUN from one controller at a time.  This means that one path to each HBA can access the LUN at a time.  When the multi-pathing software is working in an Active/Passive configuration only one HBA at a time can be used.  When the multi-pathing software is working in an Active/Active configuration both HBAs are used to access the LUN. 

This Active/Active configuration allows you to maxamize the bandwidth available between the server and the storage array.  If you have 4 Gig fibre links between the server and the switch, and from the switch to the storage array this would allow for up to 8 Gigs of bandwidth between the server and the storage array.

An additional bonus of good multi-pathing software is that you can see how much IO is going own each path in near real time.  This can help you diagnose if you have a performance problem on your network topoligy such at a switch which can’t pass the traffic fast enough, or a cable which isn’t performing properly.  While the multi-pathing software won’t tell you “Hey there’s a cable problem” but it will show errors on only the paths which are having problems.  If there’s a problem with the cable then both paths which use that cable will show errors.  If there’s a problem with the switch then both paths which go through that switch will show errors.  This all applies to fibre channel SANs as well as iSCSI SANs.

There are several multi-pathing packages out there.  Windows 2008 includes its own native multi-pathing software which can be installed via the Server Manager.  This is considdered a lowerend multi-pathing softwar package as it allows for Active/Passive multi-pathing.  My personal preference for multi-pathing software is EMC’s PowerPath software.  It allows for Active/Active multi-pathing and allows you to see path by path how much IO is going through the path, as well as how many errors each path has.

While PowerPath is an EMC product it will work with any SAN platform.  If your SAN platform or HBAs came with a multi-pathing software which only supports Active/Passive multi-pathing I’d highly recomend looking at getting PowerPath for your servers.  PowerPath can be used on FibreChannel SANs or iSCSI SANs without issue.

Hopefully this will give you a better understanding of your storage network which we as DBAs rely on so much.

Denny

Join me at the San Gabrial Valley .NET User Group as I give a presentation all about SQL Service Broker.  The pizza starts at 6pm and the presentation starts at 6:30.  The groups site says that there is no fee to attend as the event is being sponsored.  I don’t see any RSVP info on the site, so show up ready to learn.

In addition to what the UG will be giving away, Quest is sending me over some goodies to give away (don’t ask me what, I’ll find out when the box arrives).  Thank you Quest.

I’ll see everyone there.

Denny

I posted some blog posts about the keynotes on Tuesday and Wednesday as well as some photo’s already so I’ll try not to rehash to much of that information here.  I attended a wide range of sessions this week.  Some where good, some weren’t so good, and some were very, very funny (twitter commentary).  Most of the sessions that I attended were public, but a few where insider sessions for MVPs, TAP customers, etc and were covered by NDA, so I can’t talk about those.

The Sessions

I would say that the most talked about session of the summit was the Buck Woody (twitter) comedy show.  Also know as his very informative and very funny sessions which he gave on Thursday afternoon.  I wasn’t able to catch Bucks sessions in there entirety, but I was able to sit through most of them, and they were both funny and very informative.  I wish that I was able to be that kind of speaker.  Hopefully some day I will have the skills to do so.

The last session on Thursday was my presentation on “Storage for the DBA”.  I was honestly expecting a very small group to attend, as it was the last session of the day on the last day.  Which is normally not a good place to be presenting.  However with the summit being Tuesday through Thursday, most people didn’t leave until Friday so we were able to keep a lot of people there.  This along with the excellent topic selection (or at least I think it was excellent, but I’m biased) let to a packed room with people standing in the back.

During my session we had some great questions, and we covered a lot of topics.  My session this year was presented as a community session so it was 75 minutes.  Next year I think I’ll submit it as a spotlight session so that I’ll have 90 minutes.  As I review the revamp the slide deck over the next few months I may end up making it a two session presentation so that there is enough room for everything, and plenty of time for questions, maybe even a pre/post con which would give a ton of time. to really make that work though I think I’d need to get a hardware vendor to loan out some equipment so that we could do a hands on.

One this which I thought was a little strange, was that during the first ever Board of Directors Q&A panel discussion, only 16 people attended.  I was expecting a much fuller room to grill the board members about things which people had questions about.

The Summit it self

Personally I always have a great time at the PASS Summit.  However some people don’t, and this is something that we has a SQL Server community need to correct.  I was speaking with some of the board members Friday night at the hotel bar and they told me that 40% of the summit attendees were attending for the first time this year.  This is an amazing number of people coming for the first time.  However attendance was down from last year by ~6-8%.  With this many new people the question becomes, where is everyone from last year?  With 40% of the people being new this year, one would think that we would have a massive attendance growth.

There were some complaints which were over heard in the halls of the hotel that people didn’t know what to do after the summit’s official activities were over.  I can remember back to my first SQL Summit a few years ago and it was hard to find out where the after parties were happening.  It helps if you know a lot of people as the more people at the summit that you know the easier it is to find the parties.  We as the attendees who have been to the summit several times need to do better and making the new attendees feel welcome and show then the ropes.  Here they are in the strange city with a couple of thousand people they didn’t know, knowing that there’s a good time to be had, but just not sure where it is, or who to talk to in order to find it.

I spoke with some of the board about this, so that we can try and come up with a better way to make it easier to identify people so that the first timers can find the people who have been coming for a few years, and the people who have been coming for a few years can find the first timers and get them involved. No decision was reached (decisions really shouldn’t be made over been at 1am) but we got all the ideas down on a list so that they will at least be talked about my PASS HQ, and the board.

PASS can help some with this, but PASS can’t schedule every second of the day.  Even if they could would we really want them to?  Lets face it scheduled parties are fine, but dull.  It’s the after parties at places like Bush Garden (the karaoke bar) or at the Tap House which really make it the event that it is.  Now these aren’t scheduled parties, and the certainly aren’t sponsored parties (most of the time), but of all the after hours events that I went to this week these will be where I did the most networking with people I didn’t know, or that I had only met online.

I think that SQLServerPedia and PASS tried to help get people talking to each other via the SQLBingo, and I met a few people this way, but not nearly as many as I was expecting.  I think that this could have really helped the new people to the summit get to know the longer time attendees if we had some people playing looking for the squares.  I think that most of the squares did a decent job letting everyone know where they where during the week, but we need more visibility for people who aren’t on twitter, or who can’t use twitter from there cell phone to find people.  As an example most of our foreign attendees don’t have data plans on their cell phones so they can’t follow the twitter streams during the day without using their laptops.  The same goes for anyone using a corporate cell phone as it will be locked down so that they can’t install any twitter applications which would prevent them from participating.  I think that the monitor in front of the PASS HQ booth was a good start to this, but I think that we need one dedicated to SQLBingo next year (I’m working under the assumption that we try the SQLBingo one more time) which is constantly showing the SQLBingo feed in real time, no matter what comes across it.  (I’m not sure how many people noticed but the real time twitter feed which was up at the PASS HQ booth went away after the first day or so.)

Another thing which needs to change is the location of the PASS HQ booth.  It’s location my the registration desk is fine for Monday, but after that it should be moved to the top of the escalator on the fourth floor so that it is sitting right where 95% of the attendees will be walking by.  As it is now the only time anyone would go near the booth would be for breakfast or lunch.

I wanted to do stuff, but I couldn’t find out where anything was happening

I would agree that it can be tough to find out what is going on after the official stuff is done.  The typical DBA doesn’t really have the right personality to just walk up to people and talk to strangers and make new friends.  For some people this can be down right scary.  But I promise you that we won’t bite, and we won’t make fun of you for coming up to us, and we won’t send you away because we don’t know you.  The bulk of the people at the SQL PASS Summit are very approachable, and very friendly.  Those of us that have been coming to the summit for a few years know each other so we naturally gravitate towards each other in groups of 20-50.  However we are always happy to cram a few new people into the taxi with us and go drink and make asses of ourselves at the karaoke bar, and no drinking is not required we had plenty of people who don’t drink for one reason or another (religion, recovery, etc) with us.  Heck, I sang for the first (and probably last) time this year (it did take a lot of Jaeger to get .me up there though).

One of the problems with all the after parties being unofficial parties is that there isn’t really a way to find out about them without talking to people.  I’ve pitched an idea to have a couple of screens put out which would have meet up information posted on them as that info is seen on twitter or as people tell PASS HQ of an after party.  This will cost PASS some money as the monitors aren’t free, but if it gets people meeting each other and coming back year after year then it is money well spent in my mind.

A question for you

Of you, who have been to the summit and didn’t go back, I ask a question.  Why not?  What where you expecting from the summit that you didn’t get?  What turned you off of coming back to the summit?  Please feel free to leave me a comment here, or a private email to me directly via dcherry AT awarenesstech DOT com would be just fine.  Obviously I’m not on the board so I can’t make any changes myself, but I know people that are and I’ve got not problem calling them and telling them that my readers didn’t come back because of this.

What do you mean you haven’t been to PASS?

So you’ve read this far down, but you’ve never been to the SQL PASS Summit.  What on earth are you waiting for?  Yes I know it is a pricy event to attend.  You’ve got the entrance fee, the hotel and airfare costs to deal with so the whole thing can run a few thousand dollars (US) to go to, but the education and the experience are well worth it.

If you haven’t been to PASS, I highly recommend it.  If you’ve been before but had a bad experience speak up.  That way it can be fixed and hopefully you’ll come spend another week with us.  If you go regularly like me, then I hope that I was able to meet you (please don’t be offended when I don’t remember your name, I met easily 300 or more people and I’m really bad with names to begin with), and if not lets work on that at next years PASS.

See you in Seattle next November,

Denny

2010 revenue projection of $3.2M which is a 15% reduction from the 2009 numbers.  But even with this reduction PASS is planning on spending 40% more on the SQL Server community.  They were able to increase the community spending, by ratically reducing the IT expenses by 67%.

Wayne then named some outstanding volunteers that work with PASS.  This includes Tim Ford for his work on 24 hours of PASS, Grant Fritschey for his work on the new SQL Server Standard, Amy Lewis who is the leader of the BI virtual chapter, Jacob Sebastian who is heading up the PASS Member Outreach program in India.

This year there are two passion awards being given out.  The first was presented to Charley Hanania for his work with the European PASS Committee, his work with the Swiss PASS Chapter.  He has be working with PASS for 4 years so far.  The second was presented to Allen Kinsel (Twitter) for his work in preparing the PASS conference.

Tom Casey (Twitter) who is a General Manager of the SQL Server Product Team at Microsoft then took the stage.  He has reminded us that only 20% of the people have the information that they need to do their job.  Specifically they need more information from there data, and how SQL Servers BI product suite can help the other 80% of the people out there get the infomation that they need.

Tom brought Ron VanZanten from First Premier Bankcard to talk about how SQL Server BI is used by them to drive their business and why they picked SQL Server over Oracle and Teradata.  First Premier Bankcard selected SQL Server because of the Office integration, as well as the pricepoint that SQL Server comes in at.  First Premier Bankcard has gone from a new customer to an early adopter running SQL Server Madison for their data warehouse which has reduced some queries run time from hours to minutes.

Tom then talked about how the new Power Pivot platform is going to make it easier to the Information Worker to get the information they need, while IT will still control the data and the application.  This is expected to make the Information Worker more efficient without having to requesting that the IT department put together the new application.

Tom brought Amir Netz (Twitter) of Microsoft to the stage to show a demostration of Power Pivot.  The demo included bringing 100 million rows into Excel from the data warehouse then filtering that data against values which were simply entered by hand into another sheet in the workbook.  As for sharing these huge documents we have Power Pivot for Sharepoint which allows you to upload the Excel workbook to the Sharepoint portal. The application can then automatically refresh the data and allow anyone who needs to view, and then slice and dice the data via the sharepoint portal without having to download the application.  The work is all done on the sharepoint server, by using your SSAS serer to do the needed processing.

When you configure Power Pivot for sharepoint you get a very interactive set of managemet screens in the sharepoint configuration.  It will show you who’s using the files, how often they are being used, and trends which show the usage of the documents over time.

The downside to putting all this new Power Pivot functionality in your org is that Office 2010, Sharepoint 2010 Enterprise Edition, and SQL Server 2008 R2 are all required to make this all work.  This ends up being a pretty pricy solution if you don’t have Sharepoint and SQL already.

Denny

Denny

Monday afternoon was all about talking with other attendees, and meeting new people.  And I met a log of great new people.

Monday night ended with a massive karaoke session at Bush Garden in China town.  There were probable about 30-40 people there which was a massive turnout.  For now check out my twitter stream

Tuesday morning starts with the keynotes (where I’m at currently).  During this years keynote a lot of great information was presented.  When it comes to pass it self attendance is down just slightly from last year which is thanks to the economy.  But while most conferences are seeing 20-30% loss, pass is only down about 5-10% from last year.  We had 2200 registered conference attendees at this years event which is a fantastic turnout.

This years session has over 160 technical sessions over the week.  In addition you can talk with the CSS and SQLCAT teams at their booths.  You can check out the hands on labs and the ask the experts lounge.  Another great event today is the Birds of a Feather lunch where 50 MVPs will be camped out at tables talking about a variety of topics.  Find a topic you want to talk about, and get some good lunch, and some great information all at once.

The SQL Server release code named “Madison” has been branded as SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse.  This will allow you to spread your data warehouse’s load across way more physical resources than before.  In the demo from today we shows 192 CPUs on the system.  The new platform supports up to 1024 CPUs which will allow some absolutely massive applications to be deployed against Microsoft SQL Server.

A new CPT of SQL Server Madison, which has now been branded as Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter edition and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse will be available later this month with an RTM release turning the first half of 2010.

More to come…

Denny

I arrive on SEATAC at about 3:15 or so.  We still aren’t sure if we are going to use the Light Rail to get downtown or take the Gray Line, it will probably depend on the amount of baggage we have with us.  I’ve taken the Gray Line a couple of times and it’s nice since they drop of and pick up at the Sheraton where we are staying.

Monday Kris and I will be doing some touristy things probably.  We aren’t really sure what yet.  We’ll figure something out.

Tuesday morning I’ll be at the bloggers table for the Keynotes (I’ll be there all three mornings).  Then for lunch I’ll be at the Birds of a Feather Lunch talking to people about storage best practices for there SQL Server environment.  Hopefully it is a topic that people will want to talk about.  The rest of the day I’ll be attending sessions and in the exhibit hall.

Wednesday and Thursday I’ll be attending sessions all day, with my Storage Presentation being Thursday at 4:00 in Room 401 (unless the room changes).

I’ll be tweeting where I’m at and where I’m going all week with the #sqlpass and #sqlbingo hash tags so if you need my safeword codeword be sure to keep an eye on Twitter.  Granted I shouldn’t be that hard to miss.  Six feet tall with the bottom 4 inches of my hair bright blue, how hard can I be to find.

On Friday I’ve got a session in the morning to attend, then Kris and I will be hitting the down checking out the place again.

Don’t forget to print up your three SQL Bingo cards before you leave.  Also don’t forget to refresh the page between printings so that each card is different.

Saturday will be a lazy day.  I’m thinking Breakfast down by the fish market.  There a little place (no idea the name) which has a good, inexpensive breakfast.  Then it’s off to the airport for the flight home.

Hopefully I’ll see you in Seattle.  If you are going have a good time, although it is pretty hard not to.

Denny

In order for the auto-shrink feature to be really effective it has to move data from the end of the file to the middle/front of the file so that it can chop off the tail end of the database file.  This causes extra load to be placed on the disk, and on the CPU as it is identifying the data pages which can be moved, then moves them.

It also causes extra fragmentation to happen within the database as the shrink operation does not preserve the fragmentation state of the indexes within the database.  Because of this the worst time to shrink a database is write after the indexes have been rebuilt.  Because of the extra space that is needed to rebuild indexes this is probably also the most common time to shrink a database on a regular basis.

My favorite reason to not shrink a database is listed directly in Books OnLine under the “Shrinking a Database” heading.  Under the Best Practices topic it says “Unless you have a specific requirement, do not set the AUTO_SHRINK database option to ON.”.

So go and turn your AUTO_SHRINK settings to off like they should be and quit worrying if the hard drive icon in the My Computer window shows that it’s full.  Worry about about how much free space is within the database files, not the free space on the disk.   Fill the disk already.  It’s fun, and all the cool kids are doing it.

Denny

In this post I’m going to cover some of the high level information, then over a few future posts I’ll give more into what was covered.

Windows 2008 R2 Management

Windows 2008 R2 has some great new management features.  Much of which resolves around Powershell.  If you have been like me and avoided powershell, apparently it is time to get over it.  The new management tools look pretty good, and all use powershell under the covers.  There are all sorts of Best Practice Analyzers (BPAs) available for Windows 2008.  I’ll dig into this more in a later blog post.

Windows 2008 R2 Core

Windows 2008 R2 Core mode is actually going to be useful.  You won’t be able to run SQL Server on it, but you will be able to run ASP.NET websites on it, which is a big change from Windows 2008.  Windows 2008 R2 Core mode now has some configuration tools which I’ll take more about in a later blog post.

Licensing

In a very large change in Microsoft licensing policy, when you deploy Windows 2008 R2 you have to buy new server licenses (this isn’t exactly new here), however the new part is that you don’t need new Windows 2008 R2 CALs for your users or devices.  The Windows 2008 CALs work for both Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2.  This is different than with Windows 2003 R2, and may well be different when Windows 2012 R2 (or whatever its called) is released.

Exchange 2010 HA appears to be the bomb

Exchange 2010 has all sorts of very cool HA options built into it.  This includes new clustering features, as well as backup features.  I’ll dig into this later on.

Hyper-V v2

With the release of Windows 2008 R2 comes the release of Hyper-V v2.  This includes a lot of new features in the HA space.  This includes clustering, failover, and auto-poweron and off.

So check back over the next couple of weeks (after PASS for the most part) as I write more about all of this.

Denny