Darien's Dialog.. : SQL Server

Presenting SQL Server 2005... in a cinema?

darien — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 15:43:00 GMT

A couple of weeks back, I had the chance to present in a cinema; actually, it was Golden Screen Cinemas @ 1 Utama. We held a day especially for our ISV community where they had the opportunity to here about current and new technology, and how it can be used to develop the next generation of their applications. Not only that, they did eventually get to see a movie later in the evening. Different. :-)

It was very cool to present in the Cinema. For a start, the screen was amazingly huge; especially when you're down on the floor in the front presenting (check out the photos). It's so big, you can't even see what's written on the top! I've got to get a monitor like that one day. Lol!

Thanks to all that attended. It was a pleasure to share with everone what opportunities SQL Server 2005 presents to all you ISVs out there.

SQL Server Books Online.. just keeps getting better!

darien — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 14:19:00 GMT

Everything you ever wanted to know about SQL Server 2005 is contained in Books Online (BOL). I think it's the best Microsoft server documentation that we've ever produced. And guess what? It just keeps getting better! :-). Make sure you download the latest update we just released at:-

Download SQL Server 2005 Books Online

Oh, and why should you download it? Well, how about you Oracle DBA's out there that want to know can SQL do this or do that... download BOL and search it. It'll soon tell you.

What about you SQL Server 2000 DBA's out there worried about migration to SQL Server 2005 and what new features you might take advantage of... download BOL and search your worries away. ;-)

Check out the SQL Server 2005 Upgrade Technical Reference Guide

darien — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 14:37:00 GMT

I get lots of questions all the time about upgrading from SQL 7 or 2000 to 2005. I can tell everyone that so far most of my customers have gone through the process without incident. The product group really focussed on the upgrade scenerios with SQL Server 2005, and honestly, it shows; the whole process can usually be described as 'mostly harmless'. ;-)

For those of you who want to read some best practices of others that have migrated, we just released the SQL Server 2005 Upgrade Technical Reference Guide. It's a great reference that covers:-

Section 1.0, “Upgrade Planning and Deployment,” provides a comprehensive overview of the key planning and deployment considerations for upgrading to SQL Server 2005.
Sections 2.01-2.05 cover special upgrade considerations for high availability and very large databases (VLDB).
Sections 3.01-3.08 cover upgrading relational databases to SQL Server 2005, including specific discussions on security, Transact-SQL queries, full-text catalogs, maintenance plans and SQL Server Agent jobs, Notification Services, Management Tools, and MSDE.
Sections 4.01-4.03 then cover moving to the SQL Server 2005 business intelligence components: Reporting Services, Integration Services, and Analysis Services.

It's around 350 pages, and well worth a read if you're feeling a bit jittery about the upgrade and need a technical security blanket to pull you through. Download it here.

SQL Server 2005: Peer-to-peer Replication in production on microsoft.com

darien — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 13:09:00 GMT

Replication is always a hot topic when I talk to customers about SQL Server. It's such a fundamental requirement, as we always need to ship our data around various instances of our databases in the datacenter. SQL Server 2005 introduces peer-to-peer replication features that we have used in our own site at microsoft.com.

Check out this recently released article by David Lindquist, "Inside Microsoft.com: Managing SQL Server 2005 Peer-to-Peer Replication"

This article briefy talks about the other hot topic of Load Balancing Versus Failover Strategies - which I seem to end up talking about during most of my customer visits. Some of my favourite quotes from the aricle are:-

"Microsoft.com operations has a team of 17 engineers, the SQL Server™ operations team, that manages these database systems. In all, this team is responsible for more than 2250 active user databases that take up about 55.15TB of space on 291 production SQL Servers.".. Wow!

"The thought of having the same database hosted on more than one server, where each was in sync with the others and each could be written to and read from sounded great. We could load balance the databases when there was no maintenance to be done, and when we needed to work on a server, we could pull it out of rotation while the other servers handled the load. The uptime, performance, and failover possibilities were quite attractive." - Doesn't this sound like a familiar ask of the DBA? ;-)

Check it out. It's a great article.

[UPDATED] Additionally, here are some technical links for those of you that want to get started with peer-to-peer replication:-

Performance tuning SQL Server 2005 (and other editions)

darien — Mon, 29 May 2006 15:05:00 GMT

So here's an all too common question about SQL Server performance tuning. How do I tune the overall server performance using "Priority Boost" or "Affinity Mask" or [insert system parameter here]. And you know what? The product group actually designed SQL Server to decrease what's been called the "Guru gap", or the amount of work that a "guru" needs to do in order to get the best performance out of a particular configuration. And you know what else? You should probably just leave everything at default and let the Operating System and SQL Server work together to fine tune things automatically. Sounds crazy? Here's a great article I came across today that talks exactly about this very thing:-

"How to determine proper SQL Server Configuration Settings"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319942/

Here's my favourite quote,

"SQL Server uses automatic configuration tuning and it is extremely rare that configuration settings (especially advanced settings) need any changes. Generally, do not make a SQL Server configuration change without overwhelming reason and not without careful methodical testing to verify the need for the configuration change. You must establish a baseline before the configuration change so that you can measure the benefit after the change."

"Raise the Speed Limit: The need for 64-bit computing"... an event by Microsoft & HP

darien — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 14:18:00 GMT

It was great to present to all those that attended our special invite-only event, "Raise the Speed Limit: The need for 64-bit computing" at the Carcosa Seri Negara Hotel in Kuala Lumpur. 64-bit, whether x64 or Itanium-based, is an important direction for the enterprise, offering freedom from 32-bit memoy limitations, but also, at the same time, offering much higher levels of performance and reliability. As promised, here's a link to my slide deck :-

Raise the Speed Limit (darien).zip [approx 3.2MB]