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

1. RAM - RAM is cheep, and easy to upgrade.  For a couple of thousand bucks you could easily add another 32-64 Gigs of RAM (more if you buy off brand).

2. Drive Space - Disks are also cheep (not as cheep as RAM, but close).  You could drop some extra spindles in there and more tempdb off to its own drive, or even break the database into a couple of physical files and double the available IO.

3. Faster CPUs - CPUs usually aren’t all that cheep.  If you have dual core chips, and you want to get some core chips you are probably looking at ~$1500 per chip, so that probably isn’t an option.  Now if you have a single quad core CPU in there, you could drop a second one in double your CPU power.  This will throw off your licensing if this is an internet facing SQL Server.  Those 6 core CPUs may look might sexy, but sadly they are probably way out of your budget at ~$3k each.

Those are pretty much your options.  Now if your IO is being slammed that might be a good place to throw that cash, but if your IO is being slammed is it because of writes or reads?  If it’s because of writes then by all means throw the cash at the storage.  If it is because of reads, then check your hit cache ratio, and page life expediency.  If they are low, then some more RAM is in order.  This will increase the amount of data in cache, increasing the amount of time the data stays in cache, and reducing the IO requirements on to the disk to a crawl.

Everyone wants more CPU power in there servers.  But sadly CPU power is still very expensive, so it isn’t really going to be an upgrade option unless you’ve got a pretty small server.  Not to mention the licensing issues that can quickly lead to if you add more physical CPUs than you are licensed for.

All things being equal I’d probably go for the RAM upgrade.  Long term I think that’ll get you the most bang for the buck, however that’s just me.  And depending on the server I might change my mind.  Before jumping into any system upgrade think carefully about what you want to purchase, what you want to achieve, and make sure that those things cross.

Denny

P.S. My hardware prices were from Dell’s website.  Your prices will vary depending on where you do your shopping.

Currently (I’m writing this at 5:30am EST) the standings are Blue at 38%, Purple at 29%, Rainbow Fro Clown Wig at 24% and Green bringing up the rear at 9%.

Get the word out, get those votes coming in.  We’re getting close to 10% of the votes for the board elections.  I’d love to see that number get higher.  Pretend it’s Chicago; vote early and vote often (as often as you can when switching IPs each time).  As the day goes on I’ll post updates to the vote count (none of that secret stuff going on here).

Have fun, and I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.

Denny

P.S. The reason for the quick closing so far before PASS is that if hair color needs to be ordered (I’m picky about my hair dye) we need time for it to get here.

Now, you’ll want to pay attention here.  You need to print the cards up before you leave for Seattle (be sure to refresh between printing so that you have three different cards as there are more people than spots on the cards).  There will be some cards available at the Quest / SQLServerPedia booth, but not enough for everyone.  Code Gumbo has the rules laid on in a post so be sure to check them out.

In a nutshell the rules are print and bring three bingo cards with one.  One for each day.

Find people around the summit who’s handles and faces are on your bingo cards.  Each person will have a keyword to tell you.  Write the word on there square.  When you have the correct set marked off (Tuesday is a single line, Wednesday is two lines, and Thursday is blackout) turn in the card at the SQLServerPdia booth.  Each day there will be two winners drawn and emailed.

Now how do you find the right people in very large Seattle convention center?  Luck, and Twitter is how.  Keep an eye on the #sqlbingo hash tag throughout the summit as many of the people who are squares will be posting using that tag so that people know where to find them (myself included).

Have fun, see you at PASS.  Don’t forget to ask for my code word.

Denny

Changing around code is easy, moving 100,000,000 records from one table to another in a timely fashion isn’t.  It sucks, big time.

However as databases evolve over the years things change, and the database may need to change with them.

One client that I was working with (they shale remain nameless, but they know who they are; I hope) has a database that really, REALLY needs to be re-factored.  They’ve got tables where in one table the key is a single column, but another table that joins to it uses two columns concatenated together as the key.  They’ve got columns which hold numeric values but have varchar data types because a long time ago there were varchar values in there.  They use ISNULL to check for nulls in procedures and functions all over the place, when the application logic doesn’t allow nulls in the table (sometimes the database column has NOT NULL set for the column, but the WHERE clause still has ISNULL() functions around the column names.

I’ve pointed this out to them a couple of times now, and the response has sadly been “We don’t have the time, and there’s no enough business impact to justify the time.”.  The problem with that statement, is that servers cost money, and there’s are always running at maximum capacity with no room to grow.  To move into a larger server requires they move from a dual chip server to a quad chip server.  That costs time to do the move, and money for the SQL License every month (they are hosted by an managed services provider).  Those costs will greatly out weigh the costs of doing a full database redesign into a more normal database design.

The worst part is that they know they will have to do it eventually if they want to keep growing the business, but they won’t ever do it.  They will just keep flushing more and more money down the drain throwing hardware at the problem instead of maximizing the investment that they currently have in place.

That database redesign that you’ve been avoiding, it’s time to quit avoiding it and do it.  In the long run it’ll be worth it.  Granted you won’t get newer hardware quite as often, but in this economy we all need to do our part and help save the company money where we can.  This is one place where we the DBAs can really help out.

Denny