Michael Rys

Update on SQL PASS 2007 Presentations

I am giving 3 presentations at SQL PASS 2007 in Denver:

Wednesday, September 19th, 9:45am to 11am, room 709:
DBA-317-M The Next Release of Microsoft SQL Server: Beyond Relational
(co-presenting with Kevin Farlee)
Main focus will be the new features in the areas of unstructured and semistructured data management in SQL Server 2008.

Wednesday, September 19th, 1:30pm to 2:45pm, room 709:
AD-407-M Deep Dive into XQuery and XML in Microsoft SQL Server: Common Problems & Best Practice Solutions
This is the same presentation I gave at TechEd 2007, a bit shortened to fit into the timeslot. Focus is on SQL Server 2005 XQuery and XML optimizations, however they also will apply to SQL Server 2008.

Thursday, September 20th, 1:30pm to 2:45pm, room 709:
AD-312-M Building Spatial Application with Microsoft SQL Server
(co-presenting with Isaac Kunen)
This will be an updated presentation of the chalktalk that I gave at TechEd 2007. Main focus is that the demo runs now on the bits that will be shipping :).

We merged the Friday 4pm presentation on managing unstructured and semistructured data (AD-313-M) with the presentation on "Beyond Relational" that Kevin and I will give on Wednesday. Primarily because the two presentations had a large overlap and neither Shan nor Srini were able to attend.

SQL Server 2008 June CTP has been annouced at TechEd 2007

At today's TechEd 2007 in Orlando, we have annouced SQL Server 2008's, formerly known as Katmai, first community tech preview (CTP). Unlike SQL Server 2005, where we took over 5 years, SQL Server 2008 will be delivered in less than 3! See here for the official scoop and register here!

What does this bring for XML Support and other interesting programmability support, you may ask. Well, we are doing a bit of XML (not quiet as much as you may would have liked, but we need to also invest in other areas ;-) ), added a new MERGE statement, finally added some more usable date and time datatypes, work on adding support for spatial datatypes and indexing and a slew of other interesting, cool features.

I personally have been working on XML (obviously) and spatial indexing, besides being involved in one way or another with many of the programmability features, and - yes, that's the most important change for the product ;-) - the change of @@version from 9.0 to 10.0 :-).

I am at TechEd as well and will give the following breakout and chalk-talk presentations on XML and Spatial:

Wednesday, June 6 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM, Blue Theater 12:
DAT11-TLC - XML Q&A
Speaker(s): Peter DeBetta, Michael Rys
Two experts, one place to get your questions on XML in SQL Server answered. Interested in what's new in SQL Server 2008 ("Katmai"), or the new FOR XML PATH? Want to know when to use XML? How to index it? Need to know how to write an XQuery? Come to this session, and Michael and Peter will see that you get an answer.

Thursday, June 7 9:45 AM - 11:00 AM, Blue Theater 12:
DAT17-TLC - Spatial Support in Microsoft SQL Server
Speaker(s): Michael Rys, Michael Wang
The next version of SQL Server will include provide support for spatial data. This chalk talk presents the new spatial datatypes and indexing mechanisms so you can fully take advantage of the new capabilities that are being offered.

Friday, June 8 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM, S210 E:
DAT422 - Deep Dive into XQuery and XML in Microsoft SQL Server: Common Problems and Best Practice Solutions
Speaker(s): Michael Rys
This presentation provides a deep dive into the XML, XQuery, and XML indexing support in SQL Server 2005. It uses example scenarios that customers have come across when using XML and XQuery to show how to use optimize XQuery expressions, and provides the best practices on how to address the encountered issues.

Of additional interest should be the following presentations:

Today, Monday, June 4 3:00 PM - 4:15 PM, S320 A:
DAT201 - The Next Release of Microsoft SQL Server: Overview
Speaker(s): David Campbell
This session provides an overview of the next release of SQL Server that is currently under development. We cover the core value-proposition, major themes and scenarios, and some specific improvements. We also cover the new development processes being used to build this release, the release timeline and the disclosure calendar.

Tuesday, June 5 2:45 PM - 4:00 PM, N320 E:
DAT202 - The Next Release of Microsoft SQL Server: Beyond Relational  
Speaker(s): Shishir Mehrotra
As the data your applications work with changes from “words and numbers” to “sights and sounds”, we are evolving our data platform to go beyond relational data, beyond OLAP, to truly support all of the digital data types of the future. We will strive to deliver the best platform for integrated storage, and advanced applications such as spatial data, while also making it dramatically easier for you to build data-driven applications, without needing to invest significant resources in bridging the gap between data and programming language data structures. Come learn about the new enhancements in the next release of SQL Server that will help you manage all types of data.

Tuesday, June 5 4:30 PM - 5:45 PM, S210 E:
DAT312 - XML in Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Speaker(s): Peter DeBetta
XML is now a native type in SQL Server 2005. This session explores this new type, XML methods, new features for shredding and composing XML, and provides an introduction to XQuery, XPath, and some preferred practices for implementing XML, and other XML-related topics.

Wednesday, June 6 3:45 PM - 5:00 PM, Blue Theater 12:
DAT18-TLC - Overview of New T-SQL Programmability Features in the Next Release of Microsoft SQL Server
Speaker(s): Michael Wang
This session offers a high level overview of all new T-SQL programmability features introduced in next release of SQL Server in terms of SQL type system, DDL, server procedure programming, supportability, and globalization.
Friday, June 8 10:45 AM - 12:00 PM, Blue Theater 12:
DAT06-TLC - New T-SQL System Types in Microsoft SQL Server Codename "Katmai"
Speaker(s): Michael Wang
This session focuses on all new T-SQL system data types introduced in next release of SQL Server.

I hope to see you there or at the TLC booth of SQL Server.

Now that we can publicly talk about "Katmai", I will be blogging more about what's new and be available to take your feedback.

What do you want to see regarding XML support in the next version of SQL Server?

Now that we have shipped SQL Server 2005, I would really like to hear from you what you want us to do regarding XML support in SQL Server 2005. Feel free to either contact me directly or leave your wish in the comment section.

Watch out Europe - Here I come...

Tomorrow I will be on my way to Europe for the SQL Server Launch Events in Zurich and Lausanne (Switzerland) and Athens (Greece). In Switzerland I will be presenting a specially made presentation on "What's new in SQL Server 2005" that will be more technical than the general launch presentation that I am giving in Athens.

In addition, I will be visiting family, speak at the .Net User Group in Kuesnacht on XQuery and XML in SQL Server 2005, and will give two presentations on SQL Server in general and XML in particular at the Swedish SQL Server User group in Stockholm on December 8.

If you are around, feel free to stop by and say hi.

SQL Server 2005, MySpace.com and Quiznos: What do they have in common?

Now that we have shipped SQL Server 2005, I am happy to see that people are interested in using it. Today, I ask you the following riddle:

What does SQL Server 2005, MySpace.com and Quiznos have in common?

Well, here is the answer:

Here is a link to Rick Penwell's blog on the MySpace next generation project. Why is that interesting you ask? Because MySpace.com is among the top 10 most visited websites in the world and because he will be using SQL Server 2005 and the XML datatype for the next generation! And btw, Rick: You are very welcome! And feel free to contact me with any questions, issues, feedback and requests (as long as it is not overwhelming my inbox :-)).

So what about Quiznos? Well, I don't know what they use in their IT department, but a co-worker of mine recently went to a Bellevue Quiznos for lunch. Here is an excerpt from his email (posted with permission):

I was at Quizno’s subs for lunch today and I was wearing a SQL Server shirt. The guy that takes the money asks if I work for SQL Server and tells me how much he likes SQL Server 2005, particularly the XML stuff.

Man! If a guy working in a sub shop knows what SQL Server 2005 XML is, and what he can do with it, then somebody has done a really good job!

Great! I just hope that this will enable him to work on something else than the check-out counter at a fast-food place :-). So do this guy a favor and develop on SQL Server 2005! :-)

So here you have it: SQL Server 2005, MySpace.com and Quiznos have (at least at some level :-)) the XML data type in common!

International SQL Server Survey: Win a portable music player!

The Windows Server System team is doing a Learning and Help survey and need more SQL Server specific feedback.

If you live outside of the United States or Canada, we want to know more about your experience with SQL Server!

How did you initially learn to use SQL? What are your preferences for learning new topics?

What can we do to make SQL easier to learn and use?

Send e-mail to wssinfo@microsoft.com to obtain a secure code and link to the survey. Complete the survey for a chance to win a portable MP3 player!

(Please note the survey language in your mail: English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified or Chinese Traditional).

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In German:

Das Windows Server System team fuehrt eine Lern- und Hilfesystemumfrage durch und braucht mehr SQL Server spezifisches Feedback.

Falls Ihr ausserhalb der USA oder Kanada lebt, wollen wir mehr ueber Eure Erfahrungen mit SQL Server wissen!

Wie habt Ihr anfaenglich SQL gelernt? Wie lernt Ihr am besten neue Gebiete?

Wie koennen wir SQL einfacher zum Lernen und Benutzen vermitteln?

Sendet Email an wssinfo@microsoft.com, um den Sicherheitskode und den Link zur Umfrage zu erhalten. Fuellt die Umfrage aus und erhaltet die Moeglichkeit einen MP3 player zu gewinnen!

(Bitte gebt die bevorzugte Sprache in Eurer Email an: Englisch, Franzoesisch, Deutsch, Spanisch, Russisch, Japanisch, Koreanisch, Vereinfachtes oder Traditionelles Chinesisch)

SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 Launches

Today is the big launch. Steve B. is giving the launch keynote in San Francisco. I am currently sitting in a meeting room at a competitor's place where I am at for a W3C XQuery meeting watching the live webcast during our lunch break :-). I already provided a list of many (but not all) of the new and improved features of SQL Server 2005. Today's launch has some additional cool tidbits:

• We broken through the 10$/transaction cost on the TPC-H 100GB benchmark and are also on top in terms of performance.
• We have achieved the best price/transaction on the TPC-H 1TB benchmark.
• We have the lowest cost per transaction for TPC-C overall at 99cents per transactions.
• We have achieved 93'000 certified concurrent users in the SAP benchmark (that is an order of magnitude bigger than the largest SAP installations today! And more than 3 times better than on SQL Server 2000 and the earlier hardware...). Even I was surprised to see how many new SAP installations are going with SQL Server now.

On the XML side, we have no benchmarks yet (we should probably design some). But we have several both internal and external customers that built and deployed applications with SQL Server 2005's XML features. One of our internal sites replaced a 4000 line FOR XML EXPLICIT query with a 300 line FOR XML PATH query. Several of the early adopters of SQL Server 2005 already make use of the new XML datatype for storing documents. Some have documents that conform to their respective industry standard schemas. Others use XML and XQuery to process data that quickly changes its shape or is provided by their customers. Since I have not asked for their permission to be named on my blog, I probably better don't give out their names. I will see, if we can show-case one or two over the next couple of months if there is interest. In any case, such real world customer scenarios are in the end much more important than artificial benchmarks. And your feedback on performance and functionality will help us give you an even better experience in future releases.

Some other noteworthy SQL Server 2005 tidbits from the launch:

• The SQL Server 2005 Express Edition has a management tool! It is currently a CTP release, but mainly to be able to give it a beta cycle. It is available for download from the MSDN site for free (as are VS 2005 Express and SQL Server Express).
• About 50 hosting services will provide support for VS 2005 and SQL Server 2005 starting today. Maybe I should find some spare time to build something myself :-).

As to my launch involvement: I will be speaking at the two Swiss launch events later this month and I will also give the launch keynote in Athens, Greece on December 6th. On the way back I got invited to speak at and meet with the Swedish SQL Server user group in Stockholm. If you hang out in any of these areas, I am looking forward to meet you!

XQuery 1.0 and XSLT 2.0 are now in Candidate Recommendation

Finally, after 6 years of hard work, the W3C has released the Candidate Recommendation specs for XQuery 1.0, XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0. Does this mean that the recommendations are done? No, not yet. But it means that we reached an important milestone. Now everyone is officially invited to implement the specs, run the test suite, and provide feedback. Within the next couple of months, we will see which ones of the features will have at least two implementations with the same result and what may be underspecified or will not find an implementation.

Since we now ship SQL Server 2005 with its XQuery subset and are planning the next release, I would like to encourage you to check out the XQuery specs (including the Full-Text specs) and let me know what functionality you want us to implement with the highest priority in the next release of SQL Server.

PDC 2005 Videos and Slides and demos are now online

The PDC 2005 videos are now online (via http://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson/archive/2005/10/24/484434.aspx). Oleg has distilled the XML and language specific presentations.

And finally, from that list, here is the pointer to my presentation:

DAT405: SQL Server 2005: Deep Dive on XML and XQuery
Speaker: Michael Rys
Managing semi-structured and markup data is becoming an increasingly important aspect of data management. Besides storing XML natively in a database such as SQL Server 2005, it is as important to extract the information stored in the XML documents. This presentation dives into XQuery, the emerging standard to query and manipulate XML data; it discusses how SQL Server 2005 supports XQuery and XML DML; how to use these technologies to address typical scenarios and how to optimize for performance.
Download Presentation Download PowerPoint Download materials

The light at the end of the tunnel is bright sunshine!

We have RTM'ed today!

Today, we have released SQL Server 2005 and VisualStudio 2005 and the .Net Framework 2.0 to manufacturing. This means the code is baked, done, shipped,... :-). It will be downloadable from MSDN within the day and available through the other channels in a couple of days.

Follow the link for a teaser for all the cool things SQL Server 2005 will provide!

Thanks for all the feedback and help and see you at the launch events.

On my part, I am gearing up for the launch events in Switzerland and Athens, Greece where I will be presenting in late November/early December.

We are also already working on defining SP1 and the scope of the next releases. So let the suggestions, questions and feedback continue to roll!

Welcome Jinghao Liu to the Blogosphere

It is my pleasure to introduce you all to Jinghao's weblog. He is our test lead and so far seems to cover the SQL Server 2005 XML support in Chinese :-).

Please go and take a look and say 你好.

First Wars, then Tsunamis, Famines and Hurricanes, and now Earthquakes

The last year has been tough on many. Many people have been and are getting killed in wars and conflicts (Iraq, Sudan/Dafour), got devastated by Tsunamis, starve due to famines and loose their lively-hood and sometimes even lives due to Hurricanes and Taifuns such as Kathrina and Stan. And now we have the devastating earthquake in the northern Pakistan/Indian/Afghanistan area. My thoughs and wishes are with all the people that have suffered greatly and I hope they will be able to rebuild.

I am glad that Microsoft is very generous in matching donations (and now even time) and that it has a yearly Giving Campaign (hint: it is currently on. MS employees: please consider giving [internal link]). I would recommend that everyone who can give, thinks about giving to at least one of the causes to help the affected and asks his or her employer to provide matching funds. As often, unless you can provide a specifically needed skill, it is often better to donate money.

Here is a list of some organizations that can benefit (feel free to add in the comment section, but please only list no-strings attached, well-regarded organizations):

• International Comittee of the Red Cross
• The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
• Mercy Corps
• United Nations humanitarian affairs and relief agencies
• The American Red Cross (or your own local Red Cross Society)

And please do not forget the long-term issues (refugee issues, long-term famines, forgotten wars, inequality and injustices, the need for environmental protection of our biosphere) over the short term catastrophs.

Thanks.

XML related changes to the September CTP

While we are less than a month away from the official launch week of SQL Server 2005, I am still providing you with the promissed change list for the XML area in SQL Server 2005's September CTP. And please accept my apology for the delay.

Please continue here for the changes.

Changes to the default encoding handling of XML when passing XML from the client to the server.

In SQL Server 2005 versions up to the June CTP, the XML parser on the server-side defaulted to UTF-16 for documents without a leading byte-order mark and without an explicit encoding in the XML declaration. Since this was incompatible with the XML standard that defaults to UTF-8, we had reports of bugs where UTF-8 documents loaded through ADO.Net and SNCLI either got rejected - or worse - got accepted but stored wrongly since they were interpreted as UTF-16 encoded documents instead.

We have fixed this in the September CTP. The fixes(described below) unfortunately can lead to problems if you use SNCLI or ADO.Net versions that will be older than the version shipping with the September CTP and there are a few minor cases, where documents may be consumed differently and it may affect how you are dealing with XML documents returned from the server if you use certain client-side bindings using SNCLI. If you think you may be affected, please check out the list of fixes and possible impacts. Especially, if you think that you cannot upgrade the client components at the same time as the server.

Please continue here for the impact of the fixes...

Why are you searching for "sp_xml_preparedocument Failed load msxmlsql"?

Since we got "upgraded" from .Text to Community server, we are not getting good referrer log information anymore. However, since I added some additional traffic tracking I can see a bit better again, what people are looking for(still not as good as .Text.

And one of the most surprising aspects (beyond those that search my name for whatever reason...), is that quite a few queries search for something along the line of "sp_xml_preparedocument Failed load msxmlsql".

Now we had some problems in the April CTP of SQL Server 2005 with non-standard installations. But that was fixed and that problem could not affect the SQL Server 2000 SP4 release due to the different setup. Now it looks like people still seem to be running into some problem. Since we cannot repro it here at the "farm", I would like to ask you that, if have the problem, you please contact me with the following information:

1. What version of SQL Server did you install?
2. What SKU was it? Was it slipstreamed MSDE SP4, Enterprise RTM + SP4 etc.?
3. Was it a fresh install or an upgrade?
4. Please search your machine to find out whether or not MSXMLSQL.DLL and MSXMLSQL.RLL actually were installed and what path they were actually installed to.
5. If you have used an unattended install file, please include a copy.

With your help, we can hopefully get to the bottom of this and reduce the searches for "failed to load msxmlsql".