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Check out this short YouTube video to learn more about the San Francisco and Silicon Valley SQL Server User Groups!

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It’s been a great year so far for the San Francisco and Silicon Valley SQL Server User Groups, as well as the Bay Area Microsoft Business Intelligence User Group!   I want to thank the experts who have delivered valuable information about cutting edge topics in the SQL Server and Microsoft BI worlds.

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, I hope you’ll be able to join us this fall for more great speakers and topics.

Thank you Jan-July 2011 speakers!

• Mark Abramson, Forward Thought
• Sumeet Bansal, Fusion-io
• William Brown, Microsoft
• Dan Bulos, Symmetry Corporation
• Joel Champagne, CodeX Enterprises
• Prakash Heda, Intuit
• Geoff Hiten MVP, Intellinet
• Phil Hummel, EMC
• Brian Knight MVP, Pragmatic Works
• JB Kuppe, Boardwalktech
• Greg Larsen MVP, DesignMind
• Rob Loranger, Embarcadero Technologies
• Brad McGehee MVP, Red Gate Software
• Denise McInerney, Intuit
• Tony Mudie and Vlad Gedgafov, Zap Technology
• Joy Mundy, Kimball Group
• Peter Myers MVP, SolidQ
• Allan Naim, Microsoft
• Warren Thornthwaite, Kimball Group
• Don Vilen, Buysight

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Peter Myers of SolidQ gave a great overview of SQL Server PowerPivot to the Bay Area Microsoft Business Intelligence User Group.  The timing was good because we haven’t had an in depth discussion of PowerPivot since the  group launched in April of 2010 in conjunction with the SQL Server 2008 R2 launch events.

About 20% of the attendees had used PowerPivot so far.  Peter gave a good overview, and then walked us through an example app, step by step, using a variety of data sources, including SQL Server and Excel.  He’s a great speaker (and very fast typist!), and we learned a lot.

The timing of this meeting was ideal for me.  I had just met that afternoon with a client about how they pull data from spreadsheets, line of business applications, and other sources. Their process is tedious, labor intensive, prone to error, and needs to be repeated weekly.  I could clearly see how we could solve their problems with PowerPivot and easily distribute the information across their global organization via Access Services and their SharePoint 2010 portal.  Thanks again for a great talk, Peter!

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Sidewalks aren’t the only thing that’s hot in Houston. (There’s a wicked heat wave hitting Texas right now.)  Solid State Drives were the topic at the Houston Area SQL Server User Group (HASSUG) meeting on July 12th. Raul Salas (MCITP) spoke about how adopting SSDs (Fusion-io drives in this case) allowed his company to keep a client’s third party application running way beyond its intended capacity in both TPS and data volume.

I had a chance to catch up with Nancy Hidy Wilson, the leader of HASSUG, and Tyler Chessman of Microsoft,  who recently started the Houston Microsoft Business Intelligence User Group – soon to become our newest PASS Chapter. I also had a great conversation with Jonathan Gardner of Insource Technology.  Jonathan was a key organizer for Houston’s SQLSaturday #57 in January.

Idera Software, developer of a suite of SQL Server tools, sponsored the meeting. It was good to see Vicky Harp, the lead developer of Idera’s SQL Diagnostic Manager tool. I met Vicky at SQLRally 2011 in Orlando. She’s interested in learning more from DBAs in hopes of adding useful features to their products.

There were some great conversations both before and after the event. Kevin Kline of Quest Software will speak to the group next month. 

I’m headed back to California now. Stay cool Houston! 

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Things are cooking in Dallas!  The Dallas Mavericks just won the NBA Championship,  hot on the heels of Dallas being selected as the host city for the 2012 SQLRally.

Congratulations to the North Texas SQL Server User Group, NTSSUG President Sri Sridharan, PASS Regional Mentor Erin Welker,  Ryan Adams, Sean & Jen McCown, Tim Mitchell, Adam Saxton and the Microsoft SQL Server Escalation Team, and of course the Dallas Mavericks!

Read Ryan Adams’ blog post on next year’s May 2012 SQL Rally.

The Dallas Mavericks celebrate after winning the NBA Championship by defeating the Miami Heat during Game Six of the 2011 NBA Finals.

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Starting in July, the Professional Association for SQL Server is bringing Karla Landrum on board full-time.  She’ll be involved with Chapters, Regional Mentors, and SQL Saturdays. Since Chapters and RM’s are part of my portfolio as PASS Director of Global Chapters, I couldn’t be more pleased.  Karla brings passion, the ability to motivate the PASS community, and a whole lot of direct experience.

Karla Landrum

Karla has been a PASS Chapter Leader in Pensacola, Florida, and VP of Community Outreach for OPASS in Orlando.   She’s been an incredibly busy, enthusiastic, and effective PASS Regional Mentor.

To mention a few things, Karla helped recruit other RM’s, organized sponsorship from various publishers, and helped new Chapter Leaders get their new Chapters off the ground.  She’s organized multiple SQL Saturdays , including SQL Saturday #72 in Honolulu, and the one coming up on June 4th in Pensacola.  Karla has also inspired others to get their SQL Saturdays on the schedule, including the one on September 17th in my hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Here in San Francisco, I’ve also been inspired by Karla.  I’m happy to report that SQL Saturday Silicon Valley is scheduled for March 3, 2012.  I’ll be organizing that event, along with a team of committed volunteers, and Karla, of course.

If you want to keep up to date on PASS Chapter happenings, just follow Karla on Twitter.  Welcome @KarlaKay22!

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We’ve finally been able to determine that the PASS Summit 2013 will be in Charlotte, NC. The decision process has been in the works for a long time, and I think it was a well thought out process.

Long-time PASS members know that we’ve held the last three Summits in Seattle, and that we’ll be in Seattle for 2011 and 2012 as well. However SQL Sever folks on the East Coast are faced with a long trip every year.

The reasons PASS has traditionally held the Summit in Seattle are pretty simple. About 300 members of the SQL Server product team are able to attend.  Plus Seattle is affordable, as conference cities go, and the venue is the right size.  PASS HQ is nearby in Vancouver – and we have the formula down.  We can put on the world’s premier SQL Server and BI conference, with consistent quality year after year.  The vast majority of PASS revenue comes from the Summit. Therefore moving the location elsewhere has significant risks.

At our January board meeting, there was much discussion about whether we should simply hold the Summit permanently in Seattle.  However, many members of the board felt that the community calls for somewhere in the East should be respected.

PASS HQ got proposals from the cities in contention, and presented their findings to the board.  Based on ranking of everything from venue proximity to hotels, nightlife, and pricing,  we narrowed the list to two finalist cities, Charlotte and Dallas.  From there, HQ negotiated contracts with both cities, “grinding the pricing all the way down,” as Judy Christianson put it.

Last week we reviewed the final proposals. Dallas ranked high in many categories, including Microsoft’s Dallas-based SQL Server Escalation Support Team. But at the same time, Dallas is also one of three finalist cities for the 2012 SQLRally.

Finally, high ratings in many categories, and substantially lower prices, led us to award the 2013 Summit to Charlotte. We hope this decision will result in another fantastic Summit, including the high attendance we consistently get in Seattle.

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I just got back from the 2011 SQLRally in Orlando. It was a huge success by all accounts. A lot of very dedicated volunteers, along with the terrific folks at PASS HQ, created an event where attendees learned a lot and the PASS community became even more tightly connected.

SQLRally is a two day regional conference, positioned as larger than typical SQLSaturday events, but smaller and less expensive than the PASS Summit coming up in Seattle this October.

This was the first SQLRally. We joked that it was “The Best SQLRally Ever.” It was, and it might hold the title for a while, at least until SQLRally Nordic, which will be in November 2011 in Stockholm, Sweden.

SQLRally Nordic will be followed by another in the U.S. in 2012. Dallas, Denver, and Nashville are the cities under consideration, and the local chapters are working hard to win this Olympic-style host city competition.

In Orlando I also participated in the PASS Board meeting, where a lot of good work was done. It’s a pleasure working with this terrific PASS board.

Many thanks to Tim Mitchell for shooting a lot of great photos in Orlando. Here’s one of Andy Warren (@sqlandy) and me. You can see that Andy has the Florida thing down!

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I wish I were attending the SharePoint Summit conference in Montreal this week. We use it at DesignMind. It really enhances our collaboration and content management processes. It’s no wonder that Forbes Magazine calls SharePoint the “Ultimate Business Timesaver”.

According to InfoWorld, MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) 2007 is the fastest growing product in Microsoft’s history and has “as many uses as a Swiss Army knife. Its six focus areas are collaboration, portal, search, ECM (enterprise content management), business process management, and business intelligence.

Ford Motor uses SharePoint for its dealer portal, and the Marines have deployed collaborative applications to aid their efforts in Iraq. In Scotland, the entire K-12 education community is connected via SharePoint.

The great thing about SharePoint is that it offers a single environment for all your information and collaboration tasks and it’s easy to learn, use, and personalize. It has a single platform and well-integrated set of technologies to manage and lower user support requirements. Can you tell I’m a big fan?

I’m also a fan of Formula One racing, so the following bit of news made me particularly happy. If you like fast cars check out the new Ferrari.com site which was built with MOSS 2007.

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Alex Viera, John Hanson, Mark Ginnebaugh, and Paul Bertucci

We had a full house at last week’s SQL Server 2008 Migration Workshop with 55 folks in attendance. The event was at the Microsoft office in San Francisco where Alex Viera was our host. John Hanson of DesignMind and well-known SQL Server author, and Chief Data Architect at Autodesk, Paul Bertucci led the 3-hour workshop, which included a walk through the steps of a successful migration.

The crowd at the workshop included folks from AXA Rosenberg, Chevron, Clicktime, Intuit, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Opentable.com, Symantec, Shop.com, Sun Maid Growers, UCSF Medical Center, Varian, and Visa.

You can take a look at the slides from John and Paul’s presentations on SlideShare.

• Migrating to SQL Server 2008 (John R. Hanson)
• Migrating to 2008 (Paul Bertucci)

Some of the areas John and Paul covered were:

• How to reduce database costs through consolidation
• Virtualizing servers
• Compressing data
• Allocating resources more effectively
• Effective policy management

According to Jeff Van Vliet , the most valuable thing I learned was information on deprecated key words and existence of lists and support from Microsoft on the deprecated items for each new release.  Also, I liked the fact that they spent time talking about what also worked in 2005, as most of my clients are still using SQL 2005 (one major client just migrated from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005). If my clients are indicative of average enterprise level clients, they lag by a version or so, typically.

Microsoft San Francisco, 4-29-09 Migration Workshop

Rick Griest of Systron liked, the complexity of searching through legacy code looking for all SQL calls. It became obvious that it would be easy to overlook an entire block of calls if they were in an unusual format.  Also, the talk time during intermission was pretty exciting for me and I wouldn’t have minded possibly a little more”.  Rick also suggested that Anchor Steam would be a welcome addition to any future workshops…

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MySpace.com uses SQL Server in a big way. On Tuesday night MySpace Chief Data Architect Christa Stelzmuller spoke to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group in Mountain View. We had a record turnout. This was a rare opportunity to learn how a high profile company is using SQL Server to manage very large data.  And I mean large – think 130 million active users a month!

It’s pretty well known that MySpace.com started out as a two-tier system. They used ColdFusion on the front-end, and SQL Server at the back-end.  Traffic grew radically, and the technical team scrambled to adapt. Over the years, the technology has matured, but we’re talking about big data, heavy traffic, and continued rapid growth.

Christa Stelzmuller and me at Microsoft

Now ColdFusion is gone, replaced by C# and ASP.NET. They added a middle tier, and are running mainly on SQL Server 2005, Standard Edition, with a few instances of Enterprise where required.  They have about 4 petabytes of disk space, spread across 17,000+ disks.  You can read more about the specifics in this MySpace Microsoft Case Study.

That volume of data pushes the database hard, and in some cases, beyond what SQL Server can handle out of the box.  Load during replication was so high that they had to write their own replication mechanism.  Likewise for many other processes. The load also impacts the development, testing, release, and backup routines. According to Christa, they literally invented their own processes and tools, as they are in uncharted territory.

Despite continued growth, MySpace is making real technical progress. For instance, when Christa joined the team from Yahoo 2.5 years ago, they were experiencing more than 2 million data integrity errors per day. Now that’s down to about 100,000 per day. My hat goes off to the MySpace engineering team!

The audience was so engaged that an extended Q&A that broke out in the middle of the presentation. Christa fielded dozens of questions, ranging from hardware configurations to backup strategies, and then finished off her presentation. You can check out Christa’s slides here.

Christa will speak to the San Francisco SQL Server User Group on October 14, 2009 when her topic will be Service Dispatcher: The MySpace Implementation of Service Broker, and I expect we’ll see another record turnout.

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A prospective DesignMind client in San Francisco is making modest use of SharePoint 2003, and is considering a move to MOSS 2007.  The reasoning is good. They can do an incremental rollout, and gain immediate value from SharePoint‘s ability to index documents, including PDFs.

In preparation for the meeting, I had to refresh my memory in two very important areas.  First, I needed a Comparison of the features of SharePoint 2003 with those of MOSS 2007.

The second major question to answer was which features are included in each version of SharePoint?

Here’s another useful site Comparing WSS and MOSS.

The last gem I uncovered was an excellent PowerPoint file covering the Functionality in MOSS 2007 and Office 2007.  This is a great resource for those thinking about leveraging the integration Microsoft has delivered in these two major toolsets.  It will help us make the right recommendations to our clients when it comes to purchasing Standard vs. Enterprise Client Access Licenses.

No doubt there’s a ton of information to sift through on MOSS.  Next I’ll look forward to reviewing the comparisons between MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010. I must say I’m pleased that Microsoft is making our lives easier by by shifting back to the name SharePoint rather than MOSS…read my June 3rd Ginneblog post for more on the rollout of SharePoint 2010.

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Fusion-io is bringing a whole new meaning to SSD – Super Speedy Database.

Last week I had lunch with Sumeet Bansal, Fusion-io’s Principal Solutions Architect. Fusion-io is a producer of enterprise-class SSDs (Solid State Drives, as opposed to HDDs – Hard Disk Drives). Fusion-io applies flash memory to large-scale enterprise storage products like Storage Area Networks. I first met Sumeet when he was VP of IT at Wine.com.

Part of our discussion was about their products, and how they differ from the competition.  SSDs can be very fast.  They can also be pretty rugged, as they have no moving parts.  They are more expensive per GB than conventional hard drives at least for now.  SSDs eventually wear out – each spot on the NAND Flash Chip can be exercised a finite number of times before it stops working.

Key points regarding Fusion-io’s  ioDrive:

Performance of NAND Flash Chips is extremely fast. Read latency is an order of magnitude faster than conventional HDDs.  But the Fusion-io ioDrive removes the IO bottleneck and makes the cpu utilization more efficient. Fusion-io decided to adopt a PCIe architecture rather than dealing with the multiple layers of protocols necessary to implement a SATA interface.  I reviewed performance results at HotHardWare, and it’s clear that they are getting a big performance advantage.

They have the wear under control.  Their controller spreads the “wear” across the entire drive, giving them excellent life (1.2 million hours MTBF!)

The rest of our discussion was around how the ioDrive could be used most effectively on different platforms we work with a lot at DesignMind. There is work to be done regarding Best Practices for implementing SSD technology for SQL Server, SharePoint, Exchange, and other key Microsoft Server tools.  We look forward to working with Fusion-io to help them develop Best Practices, Performance Benchmarks, and Case Studies.

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Ron Lichty spoke to SofTech recently.  His presentation, Making Your Software Development Hum, contained a lot of useful information for software professionals.  Since I manage DesignMind‘s custom software development and database teams, I found this topic particularly interesting and valuable.

Ron learned his trade at companies like Apple, Schwab, Berkeley Systems, and Avenue A/Razorfish.  He’s Co-chair of SDForum‘s Emerging Technology and Software Development Best Practices Special Interest Group.  I’ve known Ron since the dot-com boom, and over the years have seen him leverage his large development community following to raise a lot of money for charity, an effort I’ve always admired.

Software development is difficult to be good at individually, and even harder to perfect as a team.  This is a discipline where you have to deliver something that works, and if you don’t, it’s obvious.  What’s not so obvious, though, is whether you got the job done as well as you could have.  It’s worthwhile to look over Ron’s slides and see his suggestions for making your software development efforts more productive and enjoyable.

If you missed Ron’s presentation to SofTech, he’ll be presenting to the East Bay Innovation Group on October 7, 2009.

You can learn more about SofTech’s upcoming meetings here.  SofTech is a San Francisco Bay Area business and technology networking group.

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Christa Stelzmuller, Chief Data Architect at MySpace.com, spoke Wednesday night to the San Francisco SQL Server User Group about the MySpace Service Broker.  Last summer, Christa spoke to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group about the MySpace Data Architecture.  MySpace is an amazing example of what can be done with SQL Server.

Christa started her presentation with a description of Service Broker, and the challenges they faced creating it.  She then covered basic features, advanced features, and the major use cases.  She concluded with a roadmap of their continuing development plans, and some fun examples of how their developers have sometimes used Service Broker to solve their problems in somewhat misguided ways.

Keep an eye out on CodePlex, where her team will be posting their work. We’ll get a chance to speak more with Christa in early November at the PASS Community Summit in Seattle.

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Perhaps you’ve heard this astonishing figure.  At Amazon.com, every 100 ms of latency costs the company 1% in sales. Sumeet Bansal, Principal Solutions Architect at Fusion-io, referenced the Amazon study as he separated myth from reality about Solid State Storage and its role in the modern Database enterprise system.

Fusion-io is a producer of enterprise-class SSDs.  Their silicon-based storage architecture known as ioMemory applies flash memory to large-scale enterprise storage products like Storage Area Networks.

Sumeet’s presentation to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group on Tuesday included a variety of reasons why SQL Server DBAs, as well as other technologists, should be excited about SSDs.  He stressed that SSDs are ready for the enterprise today.  His description of the things to look out for when purchasing SSDs was quite useful – kind of like the Consumer Reports of SSDs.

This list of differentiators is probably part of why Steve Wozniak joined Fusion-io as Chief Scientist. The Woz wouldn’t put his energies into anything but the most promising technologies.  And neither would Sumeet, who came over to Fusion-io from Wine.com, where he was VP of IT at the San Francisco company.

David Leston walked away happy, and probably stayed up very late installing his blazingly fast 320 GB Fusion-io Solid State Drive (SSD).  He won the coveted door prize, which was generously donated by Fusion-io.

I hadn’t met David before tonight, but he was on the same wavelength as our speaker.  Sumeet’s discussion of SSDs pointed out that you don’t purchase SSDs based on cost per GB, but rather by the value of the performance gains and reliability.

It was particularly interesting to hear comments from the audience about how Microsoft and other vendors will start optimizing performance based on SSD-equipped systems, in addition to conventional drives.  Right now there’s an assumption of significant latency when going to the drive.  As the operating systems see great reductions in latency, additional optimizations will add to the performance gains of this breakthrough technology.

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I just had to share this terrific demo of the ioDrive in action.  Here’s Father Robert Ballecer interviewing Fusion-io President and CTO David Flynn.

Father Robert is a Jesuit Priest.  The video was produced by Tech Stop at the Center for Apostolic Technology, headquartered in San Jose, California.  How cool is that?

Sumeet Bansal of Fusion-io will speak to the San Francisco SQL Server User Group on November 11, 2009.  We’ll be at the Microsoft office on Market Street in downtown San Francisco.  Please consider joining us.

You can see more from Father Robert on the Gadget You Tube channel.

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Geek extraordinaire Fred Davis shared the coolest, wackiest gadgets of 2009 at SofTech‘s 5th Annual Gadget Night. Fred is Co-Founder and CTO of Grabbit, and an award-winning tech journalist, entrepreneur, and gadget enthusiast.  His past lives included stints at Ziff-Davis, Wired, and CNET.  Fred’s annual presentations to SofTech are among my favorites. He was accompanied by his fiance, Lisa Padilla, host of Lisacast.com.

iPhone 3G

Joining me during last night’s introductions were Suzanne Skyvara, of Women in Consulting‘s North Bay Chapter, and Harry Chapman of the Bay Area Consultants Network, as both of these organizations helped host the event.

Fred talked about cell phones (iPhone, Palm Pre, and Motorola Droid), eBook Readers (Kindle 2 and DX, and rumors of Apple’s upcoming entry into this space), netbooks, HD TVs and associated products, digital still and video cameras, and other miscellaneous gadgets.

The Duracell Instant Power Charger, at $15.99, would be a great stocking stuffer. If you have a lot of hungry mouths to feed, ask Santa for a Chefstack Automatic Pancake Maker, which can crank out 200 pancakes per hour.  Just the thing for those 4th grade sleepovers!

Chefstack Automatic Pancake Maker

And for the tech fan who has (almost) everything, there’s also the Husqvarna Automower (a Roomba on steroids!)

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At the November 2009 PASS Summit in Seattle, one of the outstanding keynote presentations was by Dr. Dave DeWitt, Microsoft Fellow, and leader of the Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Lab, in Madison, WI.  I received a copy of his slide deck from PASS Headquarters, which you can see below.

Dr. DeWitt is working on releases 1 and 2 of SQL Server Parallel Database Warehouse.  In his keynote he reviewed the 30 year history of CPU, memory, and disk performance.  Variations in performance gains across these subsystems, with disk performance lagging badly, have major impacts on database system performance.

Disk performance gains have been made in three areas, Capacity, Transfer Rate, and Average Seek Time.  However, the gains over the last 30 years have not been uniform.

Capacity of high performance disk drives has increased by a factor of 10,000.  Transfer rates have increased by a factor of 65.  The average seek time has only increased by a factor of 10.  Dr. DeWitt talked about the impact of these discrepancies on OLTP and Data Warehouse applications.

One of his conclusions is that some problems can be fixed through smarter software, but that SSDs provide the only real help.

Fusion-io

We learned more about SSDs during the Fusion-io presentation to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group.  The DesignMind team has also been evaluating SSDs to determine situations where we can provide our clients with the most leverage.  Plus here’s a terrific video which shows SSD‘s in action.

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Captain Kirk - a cloud pioneer

By default, when you upload a document or any other large file to SharePoint, it gets stored as a Binary Large OBject (BLOB) in the content database in SQL Server.  As revisions are made, each version of that file also gets stored (not just the differences).  The amount of BLOB data grows significantly faster than associated metadata, causing SharePoint to consume large amounts of expensive SQL Storage space.  Burzin talked about externalizing BLOB storage, as well as options for storing infrequently used BLOBs in the Cloud. These approaches can help ease the backup and storage cost problems content-heavy SharePoint sites encounter.

Burzin’s SharePoint Storage Best Practices talk also covered Configuration, Maintenance, and Performance Tuning.  He explained some of the unusual stresses SharePoint puts on SQL Server, and offered suggestions on how to avoid degraded performance.  If you’re planning a significant SharePoint implementation, you’ll want to take a close look at his specific recommendations regarding recommended I/O Capacities, Database configuration and sizing, processors and memory.

Given the headaches SharePoint BLOBs cause in many organizations, it makes sense that StorSimple has a complete solution to externalize them. Their storage-on-demand appliance provides tiered storage for SharePoint with the option to secure and store infrequently updated BLOBs to the cloud to achieve substantial cost savings.  According to Ursheet Parikh, StorSimple’s Founder and CEO, Burzin’s extensive SQL Server and SharePoint experience make him a key member of the StorSimple team.

I’ll write about StorSimple’s product in an upcoming post, and will follow that with a case study once DesignMind has had a chance to implement StoreSimple’s Cloud Storage Solution for one of our clients.  For data storage, Space is the Final Frontier.

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We got the word on Friday, April 16, that Microsoft SharePoint 2010 was released to Manufacturing.  Check out what the SharePoint Team Blog has to say about it.

You can sign up here to watch the Office 2010 + SharePoint 2010 Virtual Launch event coming on May 12.

Here in San Francisco, the DesignMind team is very excited about this release. Our clients will now be able to leverage many of the new features. Our team will be able to do more custom development, with less effort, than MOSS 2007 required.

We’ve also been waiting impatiently because we will soon be re-launching  the designmind.com site, using SharePoint 2010 as the platform.  I’ll let you know how that goes, as our own launch date approaches.

In the meantime, congratulations to the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 team for some really great work!

Here’s Huey Lewis at the SharePoint Conference 2009.

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Microsoft is launching SQL Server 2008 R2 on May 25, 2010 at the Santa Clara Marriott.  Attendees will get have the chance to learn about the new features, ranging from PowerPivot for self-service BI to StreamInsight, the latest version of Microsoft’s flagship database product.

You can register for the free all-day event SQL Server R2 Launch Event here.

Tom Casey, Microsoft’s General Manager for SQL Server BI will deliver the keynote for this event.  It looks like I will have the privilege of introducing him.  During my introduction, I will provide the details about our new PASS Chapter, the Bay Area Microsoft Business Intelligence User Group.

Here’s a recent interview with Tom Casey on Microsoft’s BI Strategy in SQL Server Magazine.

If you’re interested in learning about StreamInsight, contact me for slides from the May 2010 Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group meeting with Mark Simms of Microsoft’s esteemed SQLCAT.

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The SQL Server 2008 R2 Launch Event in Santa Clara was great.  More than 300 SQL Server and BI professionals were on hand, and the keynote was followed by three tracks of sessions that lasted the rest of the day.

Buck Woody, Microsoft’s “Real World DBA” was on his best behavior, but still had some great zingers and one-liners.  He handed the baton to Tom Casey, who was followed up by Fausto Ibarra and Sabrena McBride, giving an R2 demo.  Our own Ross Mistry, SQL Server MVP and our new host for the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group, was also a featured speaker. You can download Ross’s latest book, Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, here for free.

During the intro, I had a chance to tell the crowd about our Bay Area PASS Chapters, and to officially announce the new Bay Area Microsoft Business Intelligence User Group.  That group will hold its first meeting in Mountain View on June 10th, and its second meeting, in San Francisco, on July 1st.  The group’s co-founders, Alex Viera, Elizabeth Diamond, and I, look forward to launching the group and continuing to help build the local Microsoft BI community.

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Brent Ozar‘s presentation to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group on the Top 10 Developer Mistakes That Won’t Scale was a hit.  He’s entertaining and his content was valuable to a wide range of SQL Server professionals.

Thankfully, along with the many mistakes to be avoided, Brent offered examples of alternative approaches!  I really liked his discussion on Dynamic SQL and its alternatives.  We run across a lot of this at DesignMind when helping our clients improve application performance and avoid SQL injection attacks.

Brent also entertained us when reminding us of the perils of using Version 1.0 features.  I think all of us have had the experience of investing a lot of effort into those cool new software features, only to find they didn’t work as advertised, don’t scale, and don’t last.

You may have gotten to know Brent through his work for Quest Software, and as one of the few Microsoft Certified Masters in SQL Server.  He recently moved to SQLskills, joining other top SQL Server experts, including Paul Randal, Kimberly Tripp, Bob Beauchemin, and Stacia Misner.

You can see Brent’s slides here.

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This year I’m one of five candidates for the PASS board of directors, joining fellow candidates Allen Kinsel, Andy Warren, Douglas McDowell, and Geoff Hiten. You can find our mugshots, as well as our campaign promises here.  I was always afraid to run for political office given my illustrious youth.  Luckily we didn’t have Facebook when I was in college!

It’s an honor to be on the ballot. Win or lose, I’ll see many of you in Seattle, and will continue contributing to the PASS Community.

Currently I run three local PASS chapters, the San Francisco SQL Server User Group, the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group, and the new Bay Area Microsoft Business Intelligence User Group.  Our meetings are free and we usually have 50-70 attendees at each of our meetings.  If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, please check us out!

In case you don’t know about PASS, it’s an international organization, with both local and virtual Chapters, and is a tremendous network for database professionals.

I’ve been involved with the SQL Server community for more than a decade.  During that time, Microsoft has steadily developed their flagship database project into an enterprise-ready powerhouse.  SQL Server 2008 R2 is out there now, bringing many new Business Intelligence capabilities.  I’m really pleased with all the great opportunities that PASS has given me to learn and to get to know so many terrific SQL Server and BI professionals.  Thanks to the PASS Nominations Committee for giving me a chance to get even more involved with this powerhouse community.

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Congratulations to Allen Kinsel for his election to the PASS Board of Directors, and to Douglas McDowell and Andy Warren, who were re-elected.  PASS is the Professional Association for SQL Server.  The PASS community will continue to benefit from the amazing contributions that these true professionals make.

Doug is really on top of what’s going on with the local PASS chapters, as you can see in his blog post on the Q2 Chapter Survey.

I look forward to catching up with Allen, Doug, and Andy at the 2010 PASS Summit in Seattle in early November, and to thanking them personally for their efforts.

At the Summit, I plan to focus on the BI Information Delivery track, which includes SharePoint, PowerPivot, Report Builder, Scorecards, Dashboards, and Self-Service BI.  Join us in Seattle for some great sessions such as:

• What Every DBA Should Know About Sharepoint 2010
• SQLCAT: Next Generation Real Time Data Processing using StreamInsight
• 50 surprising features of SQL Server Business Intelligence

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Denise McInerney, a Database Administrator at Intuit, spoke recently to the Silicon Valley and San Francisco SQL Server User Groups.  Denise made a strong case for how DBAs can help their employers, team members, and careers, in her presentation, “DBA as Protector of the Data: Notes from the Field“.

Her talk ranged from definitions of what “bad” data really is, to possible sources of the bad data, and what the DBA, the team, and the organization can do about it.  Her examples were a lot of fun, and the many experienced DBAs in the audience clearly could relate!

You can see Denise’s slides below, and feel free to contact me for a copy of the scripts from her demos.

Denise is Co-Chair of PASS’s Women in Technology (WIT) Virtual Chapter.  To learn more about WIT, read an “Interview with Denise McInerney” on the SQLPASS site.  They’re putting on the 8th annual WIT Luncheon and Panel Discussion at the 2010 PASS Summit in Seattle on November 10th, from 11:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m.  I’ll be attending again, for sure.

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Paul Bertucci gave a terrific presentation on Distributing Data using SQL Server 2008 R2 to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group on Tuesday night.  He talked about some of the distribution technologies, and walked us through the general process of determining which method should be used.

In making the decision on which distribution method to use, Paul showed a high level process for traversing a decision tree, guided by very specific questions about the data size, volatility, criticality, and so forth.  I’d love to see his detailed set of questions, and the decision tree itself.  In fact, I could have used the information when meeting with a DesignMind client yesterday who needs guidance on where to put their OLAP database (co-lo vs. cloud vs. server room at their office).

Another interesting discussion was around licensing requirements – in this case relative to database mirroring with snapshots.  Paul’s response to the licensing question was “that depends on what you’ve negotiated with Microsoft.”  He’s right about that – particularly with the large organizations such as Autodesk, where his role is Chief Architect.

Lastly, I want to congratulate Paul and his co-authors for the recently published SQL Server 2008 R2 Unleashed.

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I just spent the week in Seattle at the PASS Community Summit 2010, the premier SQL Server conference in the world.  There were 450 attendees from Microsoft alone, including the SQLCAT folks, who were available to provide one-on-one SQL Server help throughout the conference.  Also on hand were a large majority of the SQL Server MVPs.

The Summit was a great place to catch up with members of the community.  The San Francisco and Silicon Valley SQL Server and Bay Area Microsoft BI User Groups were well represented, and I had a chance to catch up with at least 15 of our members.

There were some excellent keynotes, with Ted Kummert and Dave DeWitt, to name a few.  You can view recordings of the keynotes here.

We saw a demo of Denali, the next version of SQL Server.  The crowd was excited about that, and during the Summit, CTP1 was released.  If you’re interested and ready to devote a lot of hours learning, you can download Denali here.

I attended several Master Data Management sessions, one with Joy Mundy and another with Paul Bertucci.  Joy is with the Kimball Group and authored The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit. She has agreed to speak at an upcoming meeting of the Bay Area Microsoft Business Intelligence User Group.

Paul is Chief Architect with Autodesk. He’s breathing a sigh of relief, having just shipped his latest book, SQL Server 2008 R2 Unleashed.  I had him sign my copy.  Once his session was done, we were able to have an extensive discussion.  Like many of the top people in our industry, Paul is on the go, writing, speaking, and holding down a very demanding and important job.

A hearty well-done to PASS for another outstanding Summit!

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I woke up very early this morning and headed off to the 5:45 am spinning class I’ve attended 3-4 mornings a week since September.  When I’m spinning, I usually put business and the pressures of the world out of my mind and concentrate on the workout.  Not this morning.  My head is in the cloud. Think Azure.

Last night, Allan Naim gave an excellent presentation to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group on what Microsoft is doing with Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and the Azure Marketplace.  Allan’s role at Microsoft is Architect Evangelist for Windows Azure.

As Allan said, Microsoft is “all in”.  They have 30,000 people working on their cloud, and cloud-based software.  New releases of many products are going to the cloud first, and then moved on premise.  He acknowledged that there are some areas where they haven’t hit the nail on the head, but it’s clear they’re listening to developers, and to the enterprise.

Allan laid out eight scenarios where we can benefit from putting our applications and/or data into the cloud. His scenarios include apps that fit one or more of the following characteristics:

• Massive scale
• High reliability
• Variable load
• Short or unpredictable lifetime
• Parallel processing
• Must fail fast or scale fast
• Doesn’t fit well in an organization’s data center
• Can benefit from external storage

I believe Microsoft is “all in,” and for good reason.  This is a real battleground, and their competitors are looking for ways to beat them.  There are cases where the cloud isn’t right, but there are more and more scenarios where our clients can reap big benefits from the cloud, specifically Windows Azure.

Check out Allan’s terrific Cloud Computing blog on MSDN.

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Last Saturday I headed down to “the OC” for SQL Saturday #73 in Huntington Beach, California.  The main organizer was Andrew Karcher, and the participating PASS Chapters were Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego.

It was a terrific meeting.  Here’s what I was able learn and do:

•    Represent and evangelize PASS and meet more PASS Chapter Leaders and members.
•    Talk to the organizers to learn how they pulled it all together.
•    Observe how a SQL Saturday actually runs – the venue, logistics, number of organizers and volunteers required, speaker evaluations, giveaways, and door prizes.
•    Meet as many speakers, sponsors, and attendees as possible.

And of course I wanted to learn more about SQL Server.

•    Clint Kunz of Microsoft gave a very high level talk on the current state of Microsoft’s Business Intelligence efforts.  Other speakers would be presenting the details in later sessions.
•    I then heard Rob Kerr of BlueGranite speak on delivering BI solutions with SQL Server and SharePoint.  I really enjoyed his practical examples.
•    Ted Tasker of Microsoft gave a really good intro to Microsoft’s Parallel Data Warehouse (AKA PDW, Project Madison).  This was great information about a very exciting project.  PDW is big, powerful, and pretty expensive, but is a bargain compared to competing products from Terradata and others.  I had a great talk with Ted afterward.
•    The Women in Technology Virtual Chapter had a great panel on the theme “Encouraging the Next Generation.”  Kudos to Denise McInerney, Meredith Ryan Smith, Lynn Langit, and Diana Dee.
•    Clint Kunz talked about the Largest SQL Server Projects in the World.  Very interesting!
•    Harold Wong is a hoot!  He gave a talk on virtualization basics that was really useful, and at the same time, very entertaining.
•    The last session I attended was with Bret Stateham on SQL Server Reporting Services Map Visualizations.  I enjoyed the interesting examples that Bret walked us through, step by step.

We closed out the event with a drawing for some great raffle prizes, and adjourned to Michael’s Sports Bar for food and drinks.

Congratulations to everyone who worked so hard to put on this great event!

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Brian Knight of Pragmatic Works spoke on Business Intelligence in SharePoint 2010 at the April meeting of the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group.

He covered building dashboards using PerformancePoint Services, and how to deploy them using SharePoint.

Many of you know Brian, or at least know of him.  He’s authored or co-authored many books on Business Intelligence, including  Knight’s Microsoft Business Intelligence 24-Hour Trainer.

Mark Ginnebaugh, Jose Chinchilla, Brian Knight, and Ross Mistry

When I learned that Brian would be in San Francisco providing some SSAS training and a one day preview of Denali (the next version of SQL Server), I asked him to present, and I’m glad I did.

We had more than 70 attendees for the meeting, which is excellent considering that the topic was not targeting SQL Server specifically.  Brian was accompanied by the Pragmatic Works team members, Jose Chinchilla, @SQLJoe, and President of the Tampa Bay SQL BI PASS Chapter- and Tim Moolic as Brian’s straight man for the evening. 

Ross Mistry, @rossmistry, was also in the crowd.  Ross has been a big supporter and frequent speaker for the group, and we’re always glad to see him.

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