Microsoft sent Dr. David DeWitt to do the last keynote of the PASS Summit. He's a technical fellow in the data and storage platform. He's looking forward to the future of SQL Server and is talking to future of technology and trends.
From 1 to 1000 MIPS is his talk.
His background, 32 years at the University of Wisconsin. He runs the Jim Gray Systems lab in Madison, with the idea of taking technology out of UW into the Microsoft product suite. It's not part of Microsoft Research, and has 3 faculty and 8 grad students.
Working on releases 1 and 2 of SQL Server Parallel Database Warehouse. Last year he talked about parallel database technology. The idea is to look at trends in hardware and then database system specialization in the next decade. I tend to agree with this and we might need to specialize with new database technology.
Let's go back to 1980. The VAX 11/780, 1MIPS, 1kb cache, 8MB memory, 80MB disk drives, 1MB/sec xfer all for $250k! This was the first 32 bit relational database. INGRES and Oracle were the main relational database vendors and the basic DBMS architecture is the same thing we use today.
However hardware is different. We now run around 2GIPS, 1MB caches on chip, 2GB/CPU RAM, and 800GB drives. Everything is 1,000x greater or more.
If we look at transfer rates on disks, we're only about 65x improvement, and seek times are only about a 10x improvement. Quite a disparity.
1985, early benchmarks. 100TPS, 400 disk IOs/sec, with 14 drives. Roughly 30I IOs/sec per drive.
Go to 2009, we have 25,000TPS, 100,000 disk IOs/Sec, 330 drives with 300 IOs/sec equivalent!
So the 1000x improvement in CPUs has been almost negated by the 10X disk access/sec changes. That is amazing. And sobering.
Transfer Bandwidth/byte, a new metric. Dividing transfer rate by capacity, then you get .015 in 1980 drives, .0001 in today's drives. So the Dr. DeWitt sees drives as slower relatively. Hard to reconcile that in my little mind.
1980 the VAXC had a single CPU, 8kb L1 cache, 6 cycles ot access memory. 10 cycles /instruction.
today we have multiple CPUs, 64kb private L! caches, 2-8MB shared L2 cache, 1 cycle/instruction. 2 cycles to access L1, 20 to access L2
What is the impact on DBMS performance. Looking at a DB2 on Linux, TPC-H queries on 10GB database and a 1GB buffer pool.
In looking at a CPU and where time is spent. Lots of time waiting for things, about 10% useful computation time. 50% of the time waiting on memory. Why? The L2 data cache is waiting on transfers. That is amazing.
Read 3 pages from disk, up to 9 L1 and L2 cache misses. An L2 cache miss can stall the CPU for up to 200 cycles.
An alternative physical layout is a column store. What does this mean? I wasn't sure this was a great idea when I read it last year, but I would recommend you read to understand. Now if we look at the cache misses, there's a difference. Same query we saw before now has many less cache misses. Less I/O is wasted.
In an example he gave, for a 10M row table. In a row store, for a simple query, 3 columns, you return 2GB of data and it takes 25 sec. A row stored only scans 280MB at 3.5 sec. That's amazing, though I'm not sure how useful this is for most of us. It's definitely built for data warehousing, and might not apply for OLTP loads.
We have our row store, a column store, and hybrids. We could include an ID with the column as well. I know it's confusing, and I'm not giving enough detail, but it's confusing to me as well. This is probably in a paper, or series of papers somewhere. I'll try to find references.
Compression starts to work better because CPU is 1000x faster, but disks are 65x faster. So you spend the time doing decompression and it still works better. Some types that Dr. DeWitt talked about.
Run Length encoding, a good way to compress data. works well with sorted data.
Bit Vector encoding, another way to compress. Use bits to represent values if there are relatively few values. Combine this with RLE and increase compression.
Dictionary encoding - Create a dictionary for the values.
With a row store, you have different issues. You cannot run length compress in that store. Or not easily or well.
A column store scanner, to satisfy a query, is more complex. A much different path of working through a query. This is very interesting stuff, and very well explained.
However updates are an issue. No free lunch. The updates are hard and creates lots of work. Research is being done on how to make these more efficient, but it's a tough problem to solve.
There is more interesting stuff, but it's hard to relate. And I spent more time listening than typing. I'll write on this more, but it is interesting. There is work being done for SQL Server 10.5, and SQL Server 11 in this area. Some of this, the Vertipaq engine, is in SQL Server 10.5, which is SQL Server 2008 R2, I believe. Dr. DeWitt hinted at other things, but I'm not sure what will be used in future products.
Daniel Abadi (Yale) has a great technology blog. David DeWitt recommends him.
Note might be sparse here as it's not a great keynote. There's a lack of excitement, and enthusiasm from the speakers this week for keynotes. I've typically dreaded the vendor keynote because they work too hard to try and sell you something.
DELL is here to talk about SQL Server in the enterprise and specifically consolidation and configuration.
We're getting some ideas about configuration management, showing us types of data to track. This isn't worthy of a keynote. There is a good list of information, but it's not something that we need talked about in the morning session, and we certainly don't need it read to us.
Why do configuration management? You can learn how to classify systems for SLAs and support resources. It also gives you priority for DR.
Ay yi yi, this is almost painful. I do like technical information and not marketing, and this isn't a lot of marketing, but it is boring and uninspiring.
I quit, this just sucks. It's not worth reporting on, unless we go Mystery Science Theater 3000-style.
Bill, the Vice President of Marketing, opened the day with a few remarks about how to keep up with PASS. Then a tribute to Kevin Kline.
Kevin has been a part of PASS for 10 years, and it was great to see people recognizing his efforts. Wayne Snyder came up to say good bye to Kevin, the past President of PASS, after 10 years. An emotional moment, and Wayne broke up a little. I can relate to that and I'm not sure I'd be any better.
An award to Kevin for his service to PASS and he received a well deserved, standing ovation.
Our new directors, Thomas LaRock, Brian Moran, and Jerimaih Peschka, were noted on the stage. Our new executive committee is:
The European conference is scheduled for April in Neuss, Germany. It will be the 21-23rd, April, 2010.
The North American Summit is back in Seattle next year, November 8-11, 2010. If you're coming back to the Summit, the lowest price is available now, so if you can book it now, you'll save around $1000. http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/na2010.
The headquarters staff was recognized as well. They are a great group of people up in Vancouver that keep PASS running all year around. I certainly rely on them for a few things, and I think they're great. The most visible is Blythe Morrow (@blythemorrow) on Twitter, so if you have something to suggest or know, send them an email, or tweet Blythe.
The way you change things at the Summit is with feedback. PASS is here for you as a user, so if there is something you want them to do, let them know. If there's something you liked, or disliked, about the Summit, fill out the surveys.
If you want to get the Summit on the East Coast, TELL PASS.
The speakers are also chosen partially based on the reviews that you give them. So if you enjoyed a session, be sure to let them know. If you didn't enjoy a session, give constructive criticisms.
I've never attended this in the past, but I've wanted to. As the father of young girl I want to be sure that my daughter has the same opportunities as my sons in the career world. Supporting other women in technology just feels like something I should do.
The luncheon was a panel of 4 women, moderated by Wendy Patrick. Kathi Kellenburger, Jessica Moss, Cathi Rodgveller, and Lynn Langit participated, sharing their stories and backgrounds. From Kathi's inspiration from her own daughter to get started with Active Server Pages to Jessica providing a roll model for a friend's young girls, it's inspiring to hear them talk with a passion on how to interest young women in technology.
Cathy Rodgveller has started IGNITE, a group looking to inspire young women in the Seattle school districts. I think that exposing children to options, and getting them to just consider alternative careers is something we need to do more of. Cathy has also created other groups that help other minorities, empowering them to open their minds to other
We already have less math, science, and engineering students in the US than in the past, but the percentage of women is declining. That's disconcerting to me. I've enjoyed seeing more and more women coming to the PASS Summit every year, and becoming a larger proportion of the data professional population. I hope that it continues in the future.
Lynn Langit, author and BI professional, gave us ideas about how to grow our efforts. She asked everyone to tweet or text someone and show support for women in technology. Brian Kelley was my tweet since he's not here, he has a daughter, and I think he'd like this. Lynn donates a portion of her royalties from her BI book to DigiGirlz. If you need a BI book, that's a good reason to pick Lynn's among the others. Put your money where you mouth is.
Use your voice, engage with girls, is Lynn's message.
If there's one thing I'd learned in my life, it's the power of words. I write on a regular basis, and he feedback I get from so many of you is how I make you think. I hear how I inspire others to reconsider their viewpoint, to stop for a moment and think about things in a new way. Take the time to talk to a women, a girl, a minority and show them that they can do succeed in technology if they want to.
There is tremendous power in just talking about possibilities.
How do you break the image? Cathy sees young women stuck with myths about working in technology. You have to work alone, be super smart, long hours, etc. They are misconceptions. Young women don't know what is involved, and we should get involved. Share your story.
A few notes from the question and answer time.
Men constantly ask for things from Lynn, women don't (time, money, freebies, etc). Why? Women need to speak up and ask for help, support, etc.
Why women's participation in technology has fallen? Girls are not inspired by technology. They are not encouraged or supported in schools to get interested in technology. Is that true? I wonder. My children have had a number of "technology" teachers, though it was not programming or technical work. Cathy says IGNITE is very inexpensive to run, so it's worth bringing up to local schools. I'll pass it along to the technology teachers in my school district.
How does a man inspire a girl in technology? The panel talked about the importance of men participating, but it's sad that they didn't give any ideas for men.
That's true, and different groups need to help other groups. Women should focus on women. Minorities on minorities. Technologists focus on technology. It takes a small effort from many people, each of us focusing in our own area, the effect changes. If we say that everyone should focus on everyone, there is no focus.
Education is the key. Teach young people about many ideas, a variety of thoughts, teach them to think for themselves.
Today's keynote was from Tom Casey, called Bringing Greater agility to your business.
The number for the day is 20%. Fewer than 20% of the people that we help every day as data professionals, have access to BI tools and technology. I wonder if that's true. In many places I'd think it was lower, but I do agree with Tom that we have to do better. We have to find ways to better bring data to our customers.
And educating them. Helping them not only to see data and use tools, but also how to understand patterns in data. That requires some business and knowledge growth from us as well.
Microsoft continues to work on traditional BI tools and technology, and continues to increase their investment. They also support PASS, with 2 dedicated BI tracks and over 50 BI sessions. 31% of the people attending chose DW and BI as their tracks. It's good to keep in mind that Microsoft cancelled their BI conference, so they have sent a lot of people here. I hope they continue to support BI at PASS, even if they revive their own conference.
Or maybe PASS would sponsor a BI conference?
A customer success story from Premier Bankcard, 9th largest M/C issuer in the US. They're likely a good BI customer, needing to analyze lots of data and understand trends. They supposedly feed information from the data warehouse to all employees. That's like saying all users receive information from the financial system because they get a pay stub.
As much as I like the idea of showcasing customers, I hate that things are hyped up and unrealistic. We believe in MS technology. You don't need to hype, BS, or excite us. We're already there. Give us real details and reasons along with realistic issues that have to have occurred.
The MS vision, BI for everyone. It's good that they're recognizing that there are all kinds of information, stored in all kinds of formats. And you can't force it all to be in databases or cubes. We have to find a new way to bring information together in new ways, and giving that power to more users.
The DIY guy, the guy, or gal, that needs to get things done. You assemble the information yourself, in Access or Excel. You build an application that's effective.
And it's done fast.
And as more people start to want your data, because it works, your application becomes a problem. It doesn't scale in Access or Excel.
It IT we've tried to squash that guy too often. We complain about them, but they're effective. Microsoft I think is giving up on fighting this guy and instead embrace him and give him more tools. I agree with that, and PowerPivot is a tool designed to work with this guy.
Gemini has become PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for Sharepoint. Amir Netz, who is a great speaker, is doing a PowerPivot demo. I saw some of this yesterday in a press briefing, and talked to a TAP customer whose data they are using for the demo. It's pretty cool.
One very interesting thing in the Powerpoint demo is the amount of compression they get. I saw 101,000,000 rows in an Excel, PowerPivot table. It's 20+GB raw, but it's compressed to 133MB. It sorts and scrolls fast, faster than it used to take for 65k rows. The demo is impressive. I might need to get Red Gate's Data Generator and give this a try and see if it really works on my desktop.
The way it works is there is an instance of SSAS running in-process in Excel. I hope it scales well, and doesn't crush the average desktop machine when it's running Outlook, etc.
There are some enhancements to the formula engine in PowerPivot, using Excel type expressions, but bringing more BI type functionality. The formulas now work with tables, not just scalars.
The thing I worry about is the refresh/recalculate of Excel being used to requery data, or recalculate things when someone hits a button or opens an XLSX. That could cause quite a load on the system. It's a good idea in practice, but I start to see the potential mesh interconnections of these XLSXes with more systems. It could cause more problems.
The idea is that users will integrate with Sharepoint and upload their spreadsheets there. There are new skins to present the documents in new ways instead of just a list of names. That is cool. Eye candy for the information worker. Not a bad thing, but I can see a meeting to decide what view to present to people.
One thing I saw yesterday, and it very cool, is a set of geographical controls for visualizing data. I haven't needed these often, but when I have, it's been hard to visualize things without a good control. And cumbersome to set one up. That is a nice enhancement.
When you upload the XLSX to Sharepoint, the application uses an instance of Analysis Services on the server. That's good and bad. It gives us something to manage, but the application appears to be automatically built to power the PowerPivot functionality. That's scary for IT and I don't know what it means, but I have the utmost confidence that things will not work smoothly and DBAs will still have jobs.
The thing that it seems to me is that you have to go 2010 all the way. Office, Sharepoint, SQL Server 2008 R2. And it's a lot of 1.0 technology.
I wonder how many people are willing to do this? I did speak with one of the TAP customers at breakfast and he likes it. It has worked well for him, and he doesn't seem to be too worried. How much of that is NDA and he can't talk about issues, I don't know. How much of it is that he's been dunked in the MS kool-aid? Who knows, but I think that it must be working well for him to be willing to share this information.
There is more information at www.powerpivot.com and @powerpivot.
Opening remarks on day 2 of the Summit come from Rushabh Mehta, vice president of finance. Rushabh is giving us some more insight into how the money works with PASS. Even though it's a non-profit, PASS needs funding to survive, a good portion of which comes from the conference.
A commitment to financial transparency, something missing in previous years, is something that PASS says they're working on. I think the 2008 Summit was a huge step forward in presenting information to members. There's a page at pass, www.sqlpass.org/governance, available to members once logged in with reports of the financial statements.
The overview for 2010, fiscal year.
No more details on that, but I'll dig in more later.
Rushabh is promoting people to interact and engage with PASS. I think that's great, and I'd like to see more people go to local user groups and network with them. You never know when it will pay off, you might learn something, or better yet, teach somebody something else. The Denver group has a great meeting every month, thanks in large part to Marc Beacom and the rest of the leaders. But it's really the 30 or 40 people that come every month that make it a success. You don't have to come every month, but try for once a year.
Volunteers are the lifeblood of PASS. I haven't always been helping much with PASS, but I'll be looking to do a few things next year. I know not everyone can help out, but consider it. And at the very least, thank a volunteer that you see walking around at the conference.
The PASSion Award is an annual recognition by PASS that is given to volunteers that really have contributed a lot to the organization. Last year, my good friend, Kathi Kellenburger received the award. This year we have a few people being recognized.
Tim Ford, @sqlagentman, is being awarded for his efforts as a volunteer, doing a lot of work and helping make the 24 hours of PASS
Grant Fritchey (@gfritchey) is also being recognized for his efforts with the SQL Server Standard. He's the driving force behind getting that publication back on it's feet.
Amy Lewis has helped with the virtual chapters on BI. She's split the groups into more focus and
Jacob Sebastian, another friend and well known member of the SQLServerCentral community, is being recognized for his works in India, helping to promote education and PASS on the other side of the world.
The 2009 award is actually 2: one for North America and one for international efforts.
Charlie Hanania is the winner for the international award. He leads the Swiss chapter and managed the European conference.
Allen Kinsel is the North American winner for 2009. He's done a lot as a volunteer for the program committee, the volunteer committee and the nomination committee. I've been following his tweets as he reviewed abstracts and completed things for PASS, and was amazed at how much work he did.
Congrats to both of these individuals for their efforts.
Women in Technology luncheon, MVPs signing books (buy the Deep Dives book and support War Child), meet the board of directors at a Q&A, and finally Microsoft sponsoring the night's event at Gameworks.
After Bob Muglia, Ted Kummert came on stage. He's the senior VP of the server tools division and works for Bob. He talked about how life has changed for him at PASS and then gave us his top 5 to be at PASS
Great adoption of SQL Server 2008 in the last year. I'd love to know more about numbers here.
"SQL Server is a great thing to be a part of" - Ted Kummert.
Microsoft rolled out a vision of how to fit SQL Server into the Information Platform Vision. So moving beyond data, to now only store, but gain insight and also use the data. The vision also seeks to get users more at the center of what the product needs to do.
The four pillar strategy
Mission Critical Platform - Quality has to be there. By all measures, SQL Server 2008 is the highest quality release ever. An order of magnitude less fixes in SS2K8 SP1 than SS2K5 SP1. But more than code quality, is the engineering. Things like slipstreaming in SPs and SP uninstall.
SQL Server is also very secure, a great track record as far as security items.
Lastly, it's also scalable. Working with partners to deliver reference configurations and information to quickly and easily deploy large systems. Fast Track 2.0 announced today with IBM as a new partner. New scale up is now to 256 logical CPUs on Windows 2008 R2. Is logical under dual or quad cores? I wonder.
A customer reference is one stage. Priti Desai of First American Title Insurance comes on stage to show how one of her mission critical applications uses SQL Server. Their application, if down, can cost them US$1million / hour. That is critical!
They upgraded to SQL Server 2008. Why? Partitioning and data compression were items listed as reasons to upgrade. Lots of blah, blah, save money, run better, etc. The standard story. Not a great reference in my opinion. Twitter grabbed my interest after a couple minutes.
Empowered IT - Some concepts that came about from conversations with customers.
Data Tier Application Component as a new way to deploy applications. Dan Jones came out to show a demo of a feature complete build of deployment. This is after an early release demo of this last year.
SSMS 2008 R2, on screen. A new "utility explorer" that allows us to create a control point. That's the instance that is like a central management for a "cloud" of servers. After a control point, you start to enroll other instances. These are instances that are managed through policy, as a group. You can set thresholds for what are under- or over-utilized server instances.
Data Tier Application for existing applications? The demo shows taking an "application" or existing database, and register it as a DTA. A wizard creates a model of the logins, users, etc. in the database and stores meta data about the application/database.
There's a change request for a table. Dan sticks a new column in the table and saves it. Then changes polices for the application, deploy only to X64, TCP enabled, etc. The multiple changes are then "built" into a solution. You can click "upgrade" and it generates the "ALTER" scripts for us. That is cool, if it's easy to track/save/store/VCS.
Demo complete, things went relatively smoothly.
Dynamic Development - Key tenets:
These are the ideas that will help leverage things with the SQL Server platform. The changes coming in .NET 4 are here to support this and we get another demo. This time VS 2010, latest build. It builds on the DAC pack from the last demo. It's imported into the product.
Based on domain driven design. This is getting out of my area, but he is showing the classes for entities that you've built. This can be good or bad, depending on how you design the application and database. You can turn off class generation in VS, which is probably a good thing.
Pablo builds classes by hand, but I'm losing interest. This is becoming a bit of a long keynote, especially with a lack of code and lots of talking about how/why changes were made.
VS demos on designing classes and deploying them is B-O-R-I-N-G
ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
A complex event processing engine. Acts on information in real time for large streams of data. It will release with SQL Server 2008 R2, and while I don't understand it, it looks cool. It will have a programming surface, a nice new term.
Some examples of how it's working. NFL, using Silverlight, allows you to click cameras and see different views. The Streaminsight piece grabs the click stream in real time to see what people look at.
Another example, processing sensor data from oil industry and make real time changes to something. About as general an example as you can give and not provide information that helps us understand what it is.
One of those great terms. We want an answer to some question in the data. This is about shortening the loop for getting answers. MS is looking to efficiently manage the information and align the systems. Master Data Management is what they are working on here. Self-service BI and then share and collaborate, meaning more piss-poor Sharepoint, is their vision.
I think we have good ideas here, but I'm not sure the implementation from the MS perspective is a great one. The need to sell units seems to override the need to slow down and build better, more intuitive and effective solutions. And build more polished, properly documented products. I'm thinking about the issues with Sharepoint here, and maybe SP2010 will fix things that haven't been done well in SP 2007.
Amir Netz is on for a demo. This has been a long keynote, but I have always enjoyed hearing Amir speak. He's one of the few I've recommended as a must see, regardless of the topic. The demo is here in looking at managing data in terms of policies and if the data is being properly used. Data quality and validation are shown.
A data warehouse monster: 20 processing nodes, each with 20 processing threads. Very cool. 60million rows added to 10TB data warehouse in seconds. 60Billion rows in total existing in there. If that's true, it's pretty cool. A report was built, and all nodes peak out, scanning the rows. A query aggregated 2billion rows in about 8 sec.
Showing off Report Builder 3.0, grabbing parts of other reports to assemble onto a new report. Also some geographical information components you can use. That's cool. Often wanted some map controls to mess around with.
The End is near: about time.
This was too long, and it lost a little focus near the end. Too much "trying to impress" the people. However a few interesting items given, new scale and features in SQL 2008 R2.
SQL Azure is feature complete, and is a complete RDBMS platform. That is interesting. They'll start billing for it in 1/1/2010. So test it now while it's free.
One more demo..noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
It shows a decent SSMS like interface for SQL Azure tables and objects. That's good. Shows some management and integration of local databases with cloud databases.
OK, I'm done.
President of server tools at Microsoft, Bob Muglia, he overseas Windows Server, Systems Center, Hyper-V, and of course, SQL Server. Bob was the product manager when SQL Server was announced by Microsoft in 1988 and actually brought a box on stage of the Ashton-Tate/Microsoft SQL Server 1.0. I never used that product, but I did use the product a couple years later, in 1991 as the Sybase port, when it was Microsoft SQL Server v4.2 (on OS/2).
Bob's talk is talking about how Microsoft has grown up, and is scaling up. There was a rack on stage that was mostly full. Looked like 7 4u boxes, but Bob says it's a single server, so I'm guessing lots of disks in there.
The demo shows 64 CPUs being used. There's a workload that's almost pegging the CPU. An application controls the work being done, and the CPUs. When increased to 128 CPUs, a new high, the workload goes down. That's impressive, but we know there's more. Bob's hinted that 192 CPUs are now possible for SQL Server 2008 R2. The workload increases to peg the box, but then the CPUs are raised to 192CPUs and the workload comes down.
It's staged, but it's still impressive at the high end. If you have a big workload, and a big, big checkbook, you can go to 192 CPUs. Not many people can get there, but I do think that this will mean that the 64, 32, 16CPU boxes will come down in price.
A new benchmark world record, TPC-E 2012 tpsE, an overall record and a price/performance record with x64 and IA64 Windows and SQL Server. In the data warehouse space, the record on Windows is now TPC-H 3TB warehouse, 102,778QphH. With Microsoft's own Dynamics product, with 20,000 used, there is sub-second response. Marketing numbers, but they are still pushing the limits.
One very interesting note on the release of SQL Server 2008 might have slipped by. The press release, and the slide of the benchmarks shows a date available of 5/6/2010. I wonder if that is the expected release for the product.
As memory, flash disks become more prevalent, the data professionals become more important. I tend to agree with that. So many people have worried about easier SQL Server means less need for DBAs. I think it means more opportunities because we can do more things that have greater impact. Bob mentions he sees our role expanding because data is so critical to organizations.
Data centers, traditionally are utilized < 15%, but they are well known ways to manage large numbers of servers. Virtualization is one of these. Easier management, higher flexibility in data centers and reducing costs. The database server is one of the last types of servers to be virtualized, but it will come.
Consistent and coherent access to data is important for all applications.
A demo of Hyper-V, Win 2K8 R2, Virtual Machine Manager 2K8, showing live migration of a SQL Server. Moving a virtual SQL server from one physical box to the next. The demo shows a live load on the server by running a stored procedure against it. We can see it running in the background as an app. By selecting "migrate" and then "next" and then "move" the virtual machine moves. The stored procedure continues running, with no interruption to the app running the stored proc.
Bob talks about Hyper-V being close to VMWare in performance. However I've seen people report performance issues with VMWare, so I'm not sure that this is a big deal.
Private clouds, a way that can provide a computing resource. I like the idea of clouds inside a company. A computing resource that you deploy do. Bob mentions this is a way to decrease management costs and scale out an application as needed. The example given is the "giving" application at Microsoft, a way for employees to determine charitable contributions once a year. There's an elastic computing capability that allows the app to live on 2 computers most of the year. But when needed, at the once a year time when it's pushed to employers, it can grow to 24 computers for a few days.
This is a good way for elastic computing to live. Grow resources as they are needed. Microsoft is looking to have companies build private clouds inside their organization first. I agree with that, learn to scale these things to 10s of machines. Once we know that, then perhaps public clouds are more likely. That's for businesses that need to keep their data secure.
SQL Azure is being used inside Microsoft. I'd love to see detailed case studies, with code, from them on how this is being used and in what places. The idea is good for limited scope items. Or maybe it's much further advanced than I'm aware of. I think I have some research to do.
The data we manage is at the center of our organizations. The opportunity for DBAs is to take our skill sets and leverage them to solve new problems. Perhaps problems that you couldn't solve before, or didn't have time to solve.
I think that's the "spin", but it's also a truth. If you are spending time managing the details, the minutiae of keeping a server running, you are making a mistake.
The opening remarks of the first day are typically from the President of PASS. Wayne Snyder, the outgoing president started with a welcome, and then some facts and figures on the conference. From the PASS Press release:
However that number lists 2,200 conference registrations, and 798 pre- or post-conference registrations. I think that of that 798, probably 798 of those people are attending the conferences, so it's a bit of double counting. I think that includes the Microsoft people as well, so the actual number of people and DBAs that are here is less. But it's still a great attendance level. Overall the attendance is down 9%, which is great. I would have thought it was much lower than that, so kudos to PASS Marketing for the efforts they put into promoting the conference.
The big reason I like the Summit in Seattle is this:
over 400 Microsoft SQL Server employees are here.
That's a lot of people, and you won't get that many Microsoft people at many events, maybe not even TechEd! I know people want to have the Summit on the East Coast, and I can understand that, but I also like the Microsoft presence. I'd really like to see a poll or vote of some sort on this. If enough people want the conferences
24 one hour sessions, running continuously around the clock. The event was great and it was one of the highlights in PASS history, at least in my opinion. Congrats and incredible props to Rick Heiges for putting that together. I participated, broadcasting live from the basement at the dkRanch. A few facts:
I had a great time, watched a couple sessions with great information in there and I hope that it happens again next year.
This was my baby, or at least Andy's, Brian's, and mine. We hatched this idea in 2003, on a trip I took to Orlando. We all met up with our families, and sitting at a table in a food court, my daughter asleep in a stroller nearby, the major blackout of the power system in the Northeast having taken place that Saturday evening and we sat there debating what type of magazine or journal we could launch.
We started it in conjunction with PASS and published it for 3 years. After the sale of SQLServerCentral, it became too much of an effort to continue, and we turned the entire publication over to PASS.
PASS stopped publishing it because of the cost of mailing, and I completely understand. The postage cost was over 50% of the total cost for each issue. That's a lot of money, and I understand the decision.
But it's back, under the guidance of Grant Fritchey and Andy Warren. The first article was recently published, and look for more coming. If you want to write for the Standard, send an abstract in.
There's a Q&A session with the board of directors of PASS later this week. It's in Room 6E on Wednesday, 4:30-6:15. I'd encourage people to attend it. It's your chance to talk to the board and express your opinion.
If you don't want to do it in person, and I understand that, there's a suggestion box outside by the PASS booth. Fill something out and drop it in the box.
It's a great Summit that's planned, and apparently 40% of the attendees are new to the Summit for the first time. Words of wisdom from Wayne: No one should be a stranger.
So say hi to someone new, and if you are new, stop someone and ask them questions, or say hi, or ask advice about what is fun to do here in Seattle at the PASS Summit.
I'm blogging from the PASS Summit 2009, making notes as the keynotes unfold. This is my second year doing it and it's a great time. Look for lots of notes and thoughts about the event on this blog over the next few days.
Yesterday was a busy one for me. I arrived at lunch, met a few people, and then went to the networking pre-conference session with Don Gabor. It was really helpful, with some good techniques that I plan to try out. Look for some other notes on that session later in the week.
Then it was the SQLServerCentral opening night party. Lots of pictures are floating around, and I'm going to post some links as soon as I can. I had a good time, the party went well, and we gave away about $1600 worth of prizes. I had more walk-up ticket buyers than I expected, so I'll be giving out a bunch of Starbucks cards over the next few days. I'm going shopping after the keynote to load up on some more giveaways. I'll randomly pick some people, but a SQLServerCentral sticker or shirt will probably get you one.
If you couldn't make it, I'm sorry you missed it. I'll try to give you a feel of the event and maybe you'll get to come next year.
Each year I host an opening night party at the PASS Summit. I set up a deal years ago with the PASS organization to refer people to the event. In exchange for referring people, and having them use my code, my company got $50 per person as a fee. We decided early on to spend the money on a party for the people that used the code, and our famous opening night party was born.
And it's the best day of my year at SQLServerCentral.
I get to give away a polo shirt and a book to everyone that comes. We print up the Best of SQLServerCentral each year, a collection of the best articles from as many authors as we can and give it away. I've also had polo shirts embroidered every year with the SQLServerCentral logo, choosing new colors each year. Every person using our code, or buying a ticket, gets those gifts.
I also budget out the event based on the number of attendees. After removing the costs for the books, shirts, and catering, I go out and blow the rest. I go to Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and look to just blow over $1,000 on whatever I can think of. My goal is to get something for every 2 or 3 people and randomly give most of the gifts away.
It's a fun event, and a great time. I think the great gifts that we let go make it for one of the best parties that you can attend at PASS. We have fun, games, and the chance to take home a prize. Some of the things that we've given away in the past are:
and much, much more.
I have a good time at Best Buy, thinking of gifts that people might enjoy. However it pales in comparison to the fun I have giving away the gifts on opening night at the PASS Summit.
When we started the agreement, it was through my partner, and he wanted to promote us a little, so he had some oxford shirts embroidered and we gave them away to the people that used our code.
The first year we did it, we gave away shirts, and it was a zoo. We were a part of the opening reception and a line went across the room. People got in line, not knowing why. It was crazy, and a mess, but great fun.
So the second year we made better plans. We talked with the PASS board and managed to organize our event to follow the opening reception in our own room. We budgeted things out, and found about $4,000 worth of money left. After brainstorming, we thought about an XBOX event. The Summit was in Florida that year, so we arrived a day early and went shopping. We'd inquired about renting TVs from the AV vendors, but they wanted $300 for a 2 hour event for 32" TVs. That seemed silly to us, so Brian, Andy, and I drove to Circuit City and bought 6 32" TVs and 6 XBOX consoles. We set up the consoles with the TVs in a room, and had people come in and play. We also gave people stickers with numbers. Our thought was that we'd have people find their matching number, and we'd have 3 pairs of winners.
When Brian asked people to find their matches, we had people running around yelling their numbers. Not exactly networking. When Brian said the first pair to come to him, we had people falling over chairs and running. It was a mess, so we gave that first pair away and then randomly gave away the other consoles. At the end of the night, we gave 3 TVs to local people we knew from Florida, and 3 more to hotel employees. People loved the TVs, and we decided to try something new.
Our third year, I was in charge and searched around for various party themes. I decided on a casino party, and contacted Aaron's in Dallas. The event was in Grapevine, and Aaron had a great price for catering. So I booked them, arrived a day early with 40 DVDs, and then went shopping with Andy and Brian. We loaded up a cart full of stuff from Circuit City, spending about $1500 on all kinds of gifts and then randomly gave them away at the party.
That was such a huge hit that I've repeated that formula for the last 4 years. I've booked a casino company, West Coast Entertainment in Seattle, and then spent every penny left over on prizes. A couple years ago I actually went over budget slightly, I was having so much fun buying stuff.
This year things are down. We have less people attending the conference and less referrals. However I started selling tickets last year for speakers and other people that can't use the code. To handle that, I've purchased only a few dozen shirts and am taking leftover stock from previous years. So instead of a new color, we have colors from previous years.
We've printed less books, and if we run out, I'll have to ship some out.
The casino company cost more this year, but I've managed to scrape 65 presents out of my budget. We have a lot of DVDs and books (40 of them) and then lots of other things. Since I won't have time to shop in Seattle, I've had to limit what I buy so I can pack it in my luggage. So no Wii, no XBOX, but I have added in some gift cards of various amounts ($25, $25, $100) that we gave away.
However the party is great, and I'm sure everyone had a great time.
I'm heading to Seattle in a couple hours. Bags packed, I've completed my run for the day, and getting ready to drive away. I've got my things packed in two bags, along with a number of prizes for the SQLServerCentral party tonight.
A few years ago I was in the same situation, heading out on Monday with bags packed. I had a bag of clothes and prizes, and a carry on with my laptop. I arrived in Seattle, and walked to get my bags. It was slow, so I waited.
And waited.
Eventually I realized that I was one of a couple people on my flight from Denver. It's a direct flight, two hours, so what could have gone wrong. Apparently my bag didn't get on the flight.
I'm not sure why, but that's stressful. At the time SQLServerCentral was independent, and I had about $2000 worth of prizes that year. Andy met me and said not to worry, especially as we had another day (the party was Tues that year). Worse case, we'd lose $2000 for the party and absorb it as a business loss.
I sweated a little as we checked in and wandered around the convention center. I checked my phone every 10 minutes for a missed call from the airline. Eventually I headed back to the hotel and had a few beers. I finally got a call at 8 or 9 that my bag was being brought to the hotel.
I still couldn't relax until I got the bag and checked everything inside. I had visions of the TSA of baggage handlers absconding with DVDs and other prizes. They didn't, and things went well.
Since then I've typically purchased all prizes in the city that PASS is being held. I go a day early and spend $2000 at Best Buy. This year that won't work as I'm stuck in Seattle until Saturday, and have SQL Connections the following week, so an extra day on the road isn't something I'm willing to do.
So I'm heading to the airport, fingers crossed, with two bags to check that have prizes split up. That way I hope I'll have at least half the things I need when I get there.
I went by Best Buy this afternoon, with my updated budget, to grab 2 last gifts and blow out the money. We’re now at 65 gifts, according to my daughter’s count. Lots of DVDs and books, but I’ve added in a few nicer things that we’ll randomly give away:
and more.
I’m thinking that I’ll save a $150 gift card, a Zune HD, and a camera for the big gamblers this year.
Lots of great prizes, and about a 1 in 2 or 1 in 3 chance of winning. If you didn’t use the SSC3D code when you registered, be sure to do it next year. We will try to have a new one set up before the end of the year.
I know there are a number of people heading to Seattle this weekend for the PASS Summit next week. I am coming in on Monday, leaving Fri, and pretty much stuck with work all week.
However I know some of you are going to be in town early or late, and might be looking for things to do. I’d recommend that you take in some sights with other SQL people, getting in some networking while you’re seeing the sites. No sense is going alone, unless you’re with family.
Last year (2008), I took my son to Seattle early. We went 4 days before the conference and spent the time traveling around the city, taking in a few things. Some of the things we did were for kids, like the Science Museum, but some were for everyone. I’ll give you a few ideas if you have time.
The Underground Tour – I’d read about this, and my son was really interested, but I wasn’t sure it would be good. I was wrong. It was fun, and interesting. you can read about it, but basically it’s an hour walking around underground, literally below the sidewalks, in the lower downtown area. At one point there was a fire and floods, and when they rebuilt, they built the roads 20 feet higher, burying the first floor of some blocks downtown. Very cool. This is a long walk, but not an expensive cab ride from the convention center.
The Museum of Flight – Maybe you can get the light rail down here, but otherwise it’s south of Seattle. You’ll pass it on the west as you come up from the airport, and will see lots of parked planes, including a Concorde. Seattle is one of the places the flight industry grew up in the US and it’s got a great museum. You can even see the original Air Force 1 plane and walk around inside it and the Concorde.
The Space Needle – A worldwide landmark. Check it out. I’m not one for heights, but my son liked it. There is some interesting information on how it was built as well.
The Experience Music Project / Sci Fi Museum – I missed this for a few years. It was closed one year and it’s a bit of a hike from the convention center, but if you are going to the Space Needle, check it out. There is a lot of music history, especially from the Pacific Northwest, but the fun parts are demo rooms where you can try out various instruments, and even scratch a record or mix a song. Definitely a great place to spend a few hours.
And check out the sci-fi museum inside. It’s great for geeks, with memories of how science fiction has evolved over time and props from many movies.
The Seattle Seahawks – They’re out of town this weekend, but keep it in mind for future Summits. It’s a fun stadium, and a good crowd. We saw the Cardinals come in town last year. In line with that, if you are in Seattle in the spring or summer, check out the Mariners.
There’s more. including a fantastic arts center around the Space Needle. If you like theater, I’d check that out.
Well, not literally. I’m not going to run to Seattle from Denver, but I’ll be running at the Summit.
Last year when the Summit took place, I was about 70 days into my running streak. I was worried about keeping it going at the Summit since it’s a busy week for me. The days are long and I’m meeting and catching up with people all day. In previous years I’ve exercised the first day or two, but then have struggled to get going as the week progresses.
I had some time to get used to it, arriving 4 days early last year with my son and running in the morning before we went sightseeing each day. This year, I’m not arriving early, thought I am staying late, until Saturday.
This year I’ll be over 400 days in, and I’m planning on getting through the week with more running! Look for me in the Sheraton health club somewhere around 6:30-7 each morning.
