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Microsoft’s keynotes and sessions catered to the business intelligence sector of the audience.  In Tom Casey’s keynote on Thursday, one slide said:

“You are on your way to becoming a BI expert.”

I know what you’re thinking, dear reader.  If you’re a DBA, whether it’s a production DBA or a development DBA, you’re thinking, “That’s crazy.” And if I hadn’t been at PASS, I would have agreed with you.  Take me, for example – I’m an engine guy. I don’t know jack about SSIS, SSAS or SSRS, and all I really care about is making the engine run faster and find ways to manage it easier.

But if someone needs to implement a large BI solution with a big data warehouse, my knowledge will help get the job done because I’m using exactly the same tools that the largest data warehouses will be running on.

The Background on DATAllegro

Microsoft recently acquired a company called DATAllegro that offered a scale-out database solution. If you needed to grow your SQL Server, you could mash together several cheap rack-mount servers, and those servers would cooperate to run the database together. When you executed a query, the work was spread out across all of the servers, and the results were returned faster than a single big server could do it.

DATAllegro’s stuff ran on Linux and open source databases, but they built it in a way that the OS and the database didn’t really matter: with coding work, a different database platform could be substituted in. That’s exactly what Microsoft has done since acquiring DATAllegro: they ripped out the open source under the covers, stuffed in Microsoft products, called it Project Madison and they’re relaunching it in the first half of 2010.

Microsoft demoed this at PASS by using a multi-node system, running a big query on it, and showing how all of the nodes crunched away to deliver the query results.  All of the nodes are running SQL Server.  I don’t know the specifics of how it’s managed – like, do you connect with SQL Server Management Studio, do you manage the nodes individually, etc – and from the sounds of it, those things are still in flux.  But forget the specifics for a second and think about the general idea.

Dr. David DeWitt’s keynote on Friday talked about the challenges of building a parallel query processor: how do you partition the rows, how do you handle partition skew, how do you make sure the nodes get roughly the same amount of work assigned, etc.  It was mesmerizing to me as an engine DBA because really, at the heart of it, I’m taking the same engine concepts I’ve been using for years and extending the size of the engine.

Before:

• A query was broken up into multiple threads
• Each thread executed on a different processor
• Each thread may have been hitting different disks on the SAN

With Project Madison:

• A query is broken up into multiple threads (by the Control Node)
• Each thread executes on a different node
• Each thread will definitely hit different disks, probably local to the node

It’s really not all that different.  The jump from data warehousing to Project Madison isn’t large at all, and the jump from small OLTP databases to Project Madison is about the same as from OLTP to data warehousing.  It’s big, but it’s doable as long as you have mentors or senior DBAs around.

So I was listening to DeWitt’s presentation saying to myself, “I can do this.  I bet I could build one of these in my lab the day it comes out.  This won’t be rocket science.  How fast can I get this, and how much will it cost?”

Interview with Tom Casey, SQL Server GM

I had the chance to talk to Tom Casey and one of my questions was about how this will be licensed.  In my mind, I was thinking about how easy it would be to sell this to a customer (not that I do sales) if they’re already on Enterprise Edition.  A data warehouse is probably already using partitioning, and if it’s easy enough to scale out, I could see moving over to Madison fairly easily as long as the licensing isn’t too prohibitive.  Unfortunately, it’s too early to tell about licensing or CTP preview dates.

Microsoft’s vision for the cloud is to offer the same services in the cloud that they offer at a customer’s site.  Microsoft SQL Data Services is the ground layer that they’ll be building on, and gradually offering more and more capabilities over time.  Same pricing/licensing questions pop up here too: it’s just too early to tell.

I asked about the jaw-dropping visual graphs that were demoed in PASS keynotes, especially the moving-timeline growing-circles showstopper.  Tom said Microsoft is looking more at visual communication of data, and that they’re doing some animation work to convey trends.  I asked about Silverlight, and he said yes, that’s a possibility too, but it’s too early to tell.

Security, the thorn in the side of cloud pushers everywhere, seems to have an easier, more basic answer.  Tom’s guidance was to think of the application as the security container: SQL Server already has the ability to do pretty robust security at the instance level.  You can put multiple databases on the same server, tighten down security, and each user will only be able to hit the databases that you want them to hit.  Sure, we end up with a bunch of SA’s because people write crappy applications that demand SA, but in theory, there won’t be such a thing as SA in the cloud.  You will be locked down at the application level, because the service is designed from the ground up to be multi-tenant.

This ties into the Fabric concept and DAC packs: my guess would be that a DAC pack has self-contained security, and you won’t be able to deploy a DAC pack that needs server admin requirements.  Otherwise, you could deploy a malicious DAC pack that got SA control on the server, and that’d be a nightmare.  If DAC packs don’t get that level of security, then a DAC pack could be deployed either to a local instance or to the cloud (once the cloud services catch up to local capabilities).

Or to a Project Madison farm, depending on licensing.  I’m probably crazy to ask for this, but I would love to be able to manage my single instances, clusters, Project Madison farms and cloud-based applications all with a single tool and a single concept.  Especially now that…

I’m Going for the Master Certification

This is still up in the air, but it looks like I’ll be making a run at the Microsoft Certified Master program.  The folks at Quest are encouraging me to give it a shot, and I’d be an idiot to turn down an opportunity like that.

I think now is the perfect time to do it: databases are about to make a few rapid changes.  The cloud is coming, Project Madison is coming, and the Fabric is coming, and if you get in now and nail down your ground level of knowledge, you’ll be able to get the inside track from Microsoft on training with these advanced technologies.  Call me crazy, call me greedy, but this seems like a great chance, and I’ll take it.

That also means I’ll be heads-down in Microsoft exams for the next couple of months.  I haven’t taken a Microsoft test since 1999, and the Master prerequisite includes a whole slew of certs!  Wish me luck.

Dear Mr. or Mrs. Manager,

Someone’s sending you this because they want to go to the PASS Summit conference.

I’m Brent, a guy who’s active in the community and I’ve been to a couple of Summits, and they want me to explain why it’s worth the money.

What’s the PASS Summit and How Much Does It Cost?

It’s a weeklong conference run by the Professional Association for SQL Server. It costs around $2,500 plus airfare.

Your employee usually won’t have to pay for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. PASS provides breakfast and lunch during the day, and vendors like Quest host dinner events each night. Since your employee is savvy enough to find my blog entry, they’ll know where the parties are, because I post ’em on my blog in an effort to save them money and get them out of their hotel rooms at night.

Will They Be Reachable if Something Breaks?

Your employee will be surrounded by thousands of SQL Server professionals. You might HOPE that something breaks this week, because they’ll get the best SQL Server support possible at any time of the year! They’ll be able to turn to their left and right and get amazing advice.

How Does The Company Benefit?

Make a list of the toughest SQL Server problems your company is facing – whether it’s how to design a solution, how to make a query faster, how to implement a new architecture, you name it. Think in terms of things you’d love to hire expensive consultants to do, but you don’t have the money.

Make your employee document each of the problems in writing, and put each problem on a separate page. If applicable, show schema designs, diagrams, or queries. Print out several copies of each problem.

Your employee can take these issues to some of the brightest minds in the SQL Server industry like:

Microsoft has an area in the exhibit hall dedicated just to customer issues. Anyone can come in, sit down, and start talking with Microsoft developers, support engineers and architects about the issues they’re having or things they’d like to implement. Bringing documentation of these problems helps make it easier to get detailed answers: the DBA can scribble down thoughts about the problem while the discussion is going on, and they’ll be more likely to remember every aspect of the issue.

Brilliant SQL Server minds come to the PASS Summit to give presentations. Tjay Belt said it best when he said, “I could walk into any SQL Server person’s office in the world, point at books on their bookshelf, and say that I’ve talked to the authors in person at the PASS Summit.” Some of them consult for hundreds of dollars per hour, and your employee can get face time with them for free at the PASS Summit.

Vendors like Quest Software have a big presence at the show, and it’s not just sales and marketing. Vendors send their best technical minds to network with customers, other vendors and with Microsoft. I personally look forward to the PASS Summit because I get to spend some face time with my own coworkers that I don’t get to see too often! While it’s not the right place to bring support questions, it’s a great time to ask architecture or implementation questions.

If you really want to take it to the next level, have your employee set up a lab environment on their laptop with SQL Server and a copy of the databases they need to work with. I’ve seen users pop open their laptop, hand it to a SQL Server expert and say, “Here’s what my database looks like, and I need to find a way to do _______. Have you seen something like this before?”

Who Goes to the PASS Summit?

It’s for SQL Server professionals: developers, database administrators and business intelligence people. PASS tries to balance the content across those disciplines.

At a DBA-focused breakfast panel at PASS 2008, I asked for a show of hands to see how many instances each DBA managed:

• 0-10 instances – about 10% of the attendees
• 10-50 instances – about 40% of the attendees
• 50-100 instances – about 40% of the attendees
• Over 100 instances – about 10% of the attendees

Can They Just Watch Videos Online?

First, the company won’t benefit as much because your employee won’t be able to ask questions to help with your specific environment. Maybe you’ll get lucky and someone else will have asked the same question during the session – but probably not. The speakers have to leave the stage quickly after each session so that the next speaker can set up, so the speakers tend to walk out into the hallway and spend 15-20 minutes answering questions from attendees. Those questions aren’t videotaped.

Second, your employee won’t build personal relationships with the experts that can help solve their problems. At each summit, I meet dozens of people that ask me for help later through the year. I’m more likely to drop what I’m doing and help them if I know them personally, whereas if it’s someone I’ve never seen before, I probably won’t spend as much time digging into their questions. The experts get more questions than they can handle. Sending your employee there in person gets them to the front of the queue all year long.

Is There a Way to Go for Free?

Yes: their registration fee is waived if they present a session, although they still have to pay for hotel and airfare.

Only about 1 out of 4 presentation submissions are accepted (and yes, I was turned down.) There’s a ton of top-notch talent competing for slots. If you want your employee to make the cut, they need to build up their presentation skills first by presenting at their local PASS chapter and at regional SQL Server events.

Each presentation will take them a day or two to build. If you want to help them get a speaking slot, you can help by dedicating one day per month to building a presentation.

Building these presentations forces them to get better at their job because they have to document something in a way to educate others. You want your employees to be better at documentation and cross-training, right? This sounds like a two-for-one deal: they get better at documentation, and they save you money toward their PASS costs.

There’s another way to get registration fees waived, and it’s a sure bet instead of a risk: become a PASS chapter leader. The downside is that it requires significantly more time, because it takes 4-5 hours a week to lead a PASS chapter. They have to entice speakers for the monthly meetings, promote the group, talk to other chapter leads, and so on. It takes more commitment out of their workday time, but if you want them to attend for free, that’s a sure way to save money.

Why Don’t They Pay Their Own Way?

Some attendees do. As their manager, though, there’s something you need to think about before you let an employee go on their own dime.

Your employee will be networking with other SQL Server professionals – folks who are working for other companies who picked up the tab. During the summit, everyone talks to each other about their jobs, their companies and their bosses. A lot of these SQL Server people will be trying to hire more help, and they’ll be talking about their benefits.  Benefits like the ability to go to the PASS Summit for training.

I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’ – you might want to write this into the 2009 budget as a part of their benefits and training package.

Update 5/2009: More Reasons from Steve Jones

Steve Jones of SQLServerCentral adds more reasons why you should go to #SQLPass.

George Box said, “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.”  Donald illustrated this point with a brief history lesson.  Early models of the universe said the sun revolved around the earth, and with that model, marvelous things were possible in architecture, celestial navigation and science.  Even though the model was wrong, it was still extremely useful.  Data modeling holds to that same statement: your models will never be right, but your key is to figure out which ones are useful enough.

Donald holds four things to be important: data mining must be actionable, innovative, trustworthy and seamless.  I think the innovative part is what keeps data mining in the back closet: data mining gives companies an edge, and when they get good at it, they don’t necessarily show it off for fear of losing their newfound competitive advantage.

He noted that last year, Microsoft’s BI lifecycle charts had steps for integration, reporting and analytics.  The new ones include steps for data entry, because that’s also a part of the process.  This points to how Excel is being integrated into the process because end users have data of their own that they weren’t necessarily integrating into the data mining lifecycle.  The IT team might not be able to integrate it in time, and the user wants to go go go.  The users want to take our historical data in the data warehouse, toss in some new data (like maybe about a new ad campaign) and make predictions about what’s going to happen.

He explained that clustering is the science of finding bad data by looking for outliers.  For example, your income data might fall into a model like this:

• Young people have low income
• Middle-aged people have high income
• Older people have low income as they go into retirement

If Britney Spears comes in to apply for a loan, her data might be an outlier.  In data mining, you need to figure out if it’s valid data or not.  Malcolm Gladwell’s recent book Outliers wasn’t mentioned in the speech, but for a pop science version of data mining, take a look at it.

Donald showed how to use analytics to predict outliers in a web form and explained that you don’t have to hard-code the rules to find outliers.  For example, you don’t have to hard-code ages and income ranges.  That’s helpful in case your business changes dramatically – like if you merge with a bigger company with more customers, or move geographic ranges – you don’t have to recode your hard-coded business rules.  The database engine just uses the analytics to determine the rules.

In SSIS, you can add a data mining query step which is essentially making a prediction.  It calls out to an SSAS mining model to guess what your missing values are (or to create additional values) as part of the data flow.  You might have a sales promotion to be emailed to customers aged 25-35, but not all of your source data has the customer’s age.  A data mining task in SSIS could fill those gaps in your data.

He demoed the Excel Table Analysis Tools with the passenger manifest from the Titanic.  Very funny.  Later on, after the session, he happened to run across me and some other DBAs sitting in a hallway with our Macbooks open.  One question led to another, and next thing you know, he had his laptop open and we were data mining the Titanic survivors to see if older women were more likely to survive than younger women.  (As it turns out, the answer was no.)

Jeremiah Peschka of Facility9.com summed it up when he turned to me during the session and said that he wanted to go find out as much as he possibly could about data mining.  I’m fall into that same cluster, so to speak – data mining isn’t my “job” either, but it has so many cool benefits that I have to figure out how to integrate it into my workflow.  That was essentially the message in Donald Farmer’s session: predictive analytics works best when it’s an integral part of our daily jobs, built into the tools we use every day.

Updates

It’s Friday, it’s 8:30 AM, and it’s time for another keynote.

8:30 AM – Bill Graziano just rode out on a trike!

8:40 – Two sessions will be repeated today due to high demand. At 10:45 in room 604 they’re repeating the clustering session, and 2:30 in room 6E is SQL Server on SAN.

8:45 – The PASS Board Election results are in! The new board members are Douglas McDowell, Lynda Rab and Andy Warren! That means Tom LaRock, Pat Wright and Louis Davidson didn’t make it. Here’s some blog links from each candidate’s experiences:

• Andy Warren
• Louis Davidson (DrSQL)
• Tom LaRock

8:47 – now announcing winners of the SQL Heroes contest.

8:50 – The winner: BIDS Helper with a perfect score of 55! I wish I could tell you the rest, but the slides rolled off the screen within 30 seconds. Damn. Update: thanks to Adam Machanic, they’re:

1. BIDS Helper – I’ve heard this mentioned repeatedly over the week by presenters
2. Extended Events Manager
3. SSISUnit
4. CDC Helper
5. QPee tools by Jason Massie! Woohoo!

8:55 – Dell reviewing the Microsoft BI platform reference architecture with the entire BI stack including PerformancePoint.

9:00 – Bill Graziano back up onstage to introduce Dr. David DeWitt from Microsoft.

9:03 – David’s great – he’s identifying all the reasons why his presentation will suck: he doesn’t have a motorcycle, he doesn’t have new presentations, etc! Hilarious. Love it.

9:10 – He’s going through the basics of why linear scaleup is a good solution, and how the numbers work.

9:12 – Ebay has a couple of >1 petabyte warehouses with 85 disk drives for storage. As a former SAN guy, I’m guessing I heard those numbers wrong, because that sounds ridiculously impossible. (Update – that numbers is 8500 disk drives, which also sounds ridiculous but on the other extreme, hahaha.)

9:15 – DATAllegro works because it’s shared-nothing: no shared memory, no shared SAN, etc. Runs with commodity gear like a bunch of rackmount servers connected via gigabit networks or Infiniband. This same hardware model is used by all the major search engines.

9:20 – Interesting – he’s getting ready to talk about design alternatives to shared-nothing cluster approaches. I like it when a vendor is honest and says, “This is another way to do it other than what we’re talking about.” He’s covering horizontal partitioning now.

9:23 – Brilliant. He’s using animated pictures to show how the different partitioning methods work when they’re loading data. As he shows round-robin partitioning, the loaded rows populate onto the different visual database servers. It occurs to me that he’s never really left education – he understands how to convey complicated information to a wide audience.

9:30 – He’s explaining about how you scale out joins in shared-nothing systems and how relational operators affect the joins. This is amazing stuff.

9:32 – With Project Madison, reading execution plans is going to be a lot more interesting: we’re going to need to pay more attention to how each individual thread works, because the load really needs to be balanced. Right now, if you have a parallel operation broken out across 8 threads, for example, you’re not too concerned whether one thread finishes faster. When each thread is running on a separate machine, each with a separate set of data, you need to pay close attention to what kinds of data you’re putting on each machine. This is mesmerizing for engine guys like me.

9:38 – He’s talking about the role of indexes. I’m not even going to try to blog this from here on out. If you’re into query execution plans, if you’re into data warehousing or if you’re into scale-out architectures, you definitely want to watch the recording of this presentation. He’s brilliant and it has a lot of impact on people who will use Project Madison.

9:47 – I said I wasn’t going to keep blogging, but man, this is really, really important. Your indexing strategies, especially your clustered index strategy, is going to be dramatically different. There’s some similarities with OLTP partitioning – scenarios where you partitioned in order to gain concurrency benefits – but man, you gotta be paying attention. I can easily see where a Project Madison implementation will benefit from having a person specifically dedicated to determining the correct partitioning keys for a month or more, just testing and benchmarking. Schema changes will also require careful planning to make sure the data lands on the right nodes for querying speed.

9:52 – When the engine has to join two large tables that are partitioned in different ways, it’s called Table Repartitioning. Each node splits its part of the table out into N parts (N being the number of nodes) and then splits that data out to all of the other nodes. It’s done by splitting, shuffling and combining. Networking is fast enough that it’s not a bottleneck, they say. Can’t wait to see that part in action – technologically impressive!

9:55 – Thinking about concurrency problems, I’m amazed that this stuff works. It’s shuffling data between nodes in order to recombine for a query, and yet you could have inserts/updates/deletes going on at the same time too. I’d love to play with benchmarks to see when Madison starts to pay off: for example, if you have a 16-core box with 128gb of memory, how many Madison nodes would you need to keep up when there’s heavy insert/update/delete activity going on? I’m not saying Madison doesn’t pay off – I’m sure it will – but it’s a neat theoretical question to ask. (But it depends on the activity and the schema, of course – it’d cost a lot to find the answer, and the answer would only be valid in limited scenarios.)

9:57 – This has awesome backup implications. It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: on a scaled-out Madison system, the dimensions will be copied across all of the nodes, but fact tables will be spread out and not copied everywhere. Now, for the new part: I wonder how backups will work. With data spread out so far, the amount of throughput coming from Madison to the backup system will be insanely, screamingly fast. Toss in a compression product like LiteSpeed, and wow, I bet I could back up terabytes in minutes. I’m going to need a lot of storage speed on the target end just to keep up!

10:00 – Partition skew = an unbalanced amount of data in specific partitions (now nodes). The engine can either has functions (almost random) or range partitioning (manual setup). Since the node with the most data has the slowest response time, and that determines the query’s total execution time, then you have to pay attention to partition skew or your queries will slow down.

10:02 – DeWitt’s Gray Systems Lab is working with the DATAllegro team to build a new “world-class parallel optimizer” to make it easier to work around partition skew, among other things. Wow – brain power. “Microsoft intends to become the premier supplier of scalable database systems for data warehousing.” Interesting – that wouldn’t appear to put them in competition for lower-end scale-out systems.

10:03 – Done. Wow, he was awesome for engine guys like me! Off to the sessions…

Other bloggers took some great notes during the keynote:

• Adam Machanic
• Jeremiah Peschka

PASS Board Election Results Dribbling In

Andy Warren is in!  He talks about it on his blog, and I got a huge chuckle out of this part:

I didn’t have any idea what my chances were, I really didn’t do a lot of campaigning (hard to figure out a way to do it that didn’t seem icky given the constraints) other than my blog, so I attribute tit to my PASS related blog posts resonating some with those that were voting, and probably more so the relationships I’ve built over the years.

PASS makes it almost impossible to campaign: they choose candidates days before the election starts, and the election runs during a short few days where the voters AND the candidates are at their most busy time of the entire year!  I wasn’t running for the board, and I didn’t have enough time to do everything I needed to do for my JOB here, let alone run a campaign.

To be more fair to the candidates, it’d be great if the candidate list was determined, say, one month before the election.  That would allow the candidates more time to build a message, get that message out to the voters, and let the voters understand each candidate.  Otherwise, it’s a popularity party – “Oh, I’ve read that guy’s book.”

Don’t get me wrong, though: I’m glad Andy won, because his ideas for PASS resound with me, but it bums me out because Tom LaRock didn’t make it.  I like how he calls himself the Susan Lucci of the PASS Board elections.  When he runs next year, I’ll be tempted to campaign for him by saying, “This is Tom LaRock, but don’t vote for him because it’ll break the trend.”

And even though he didn’t win, he fulfilled his end of the deal anyway: Tom LaRock got a tattoo.  I promptly emailed the photo to Congress (his wife).  Expect to see that photo surface around this time next year just before the voting starts.

Focusing on BI

I got the chance to interview Tom Casey yesterday, and we focused on BI because frankly, that’s where the action is right now.  I’m still digesting everything going on in BI, and I’m going to write my blog post about that on the plane ride home tomorrow.  Plane rides, plural, I guess.

The one thing that keeps resonating with me is a single line on one of Tom’s slides: “You are on your way to becoming a BI expert.”  Whether you came to the PASS Summit to learn about the engine, about development or about something else, you were learning things that were directly applicable to building a BI solution.  Jeremiah Peschka said that he’d originally come to the summit to dive deeper into development, but with the other sessions available, he realized he’d rather broaden his expertise and see other subject areas that he wouldn’t ordinarily have a chance to access.  I agree – I get the most value out of sessions that are way outside my comfort zone, like the one by Andy Leonard and Jessica Moss about SSIS scripting.

Jamie MacLennan blogged about his BI Power Hour demo: he used analytics to determine which foods to buy for his picky kids.  It’s a really funny read:

“So, I decided to make a worksheet listing foods they these kids will eat and won’t eat.  I used attributes of Color, Type, and Processed, along with a column indicating whether or not they will actually eat the food.  Of course, I had to answer to myself disturbing questions such as “what color are hot dogs?”, but I got through it.”

It’s always good to see that vendors like Microsoft eat their own dog food.  Wait – that doesn’t sound right…

PASS Reception

It was just awesome – the Flock of SQLs sounded way better than a bunch of SQL Server people have the right to sound, and the room was chock full of fun stuff to do.  It was a little loud, which made it tough to play the video games scattered through the room, but you can’t have everything.

Rather than describe the madness, I’ll just link to my PASS Summit 2008 photoset on Flickr.  Be advised that some of the photos contain men getting tattoos.  And one is a tramp stamp.  ‘Nuff said.

Wednesday Recaps Around the Web

• Ajarn Mark
• Andy Warren
• Buck Woody
• Jason Massie explains Twitter – this isn’t a PASS Recap per se, but Twitter was mentioned so much around the conference and we’ve got a lot of newcomers. If you want to understand what it’s all about, read Jason’s post. (And definitely follow Jason Massie on Twitter, because he rocks.)
• Jeremiah Peschka – see, I got your name right again. I won’t lie, though: I typed the J and then backspaced.
• Joe Webb
• SQL in the Wild
  

This morning, I’m heading out for breakfast and then nonstop sessions.  I had to do a lot of work-related stuff the first couple of days, and now it’s time to get my learn on.  I don’t know how PASS volunteers keep their skills up: all of them spend so much time volunteering, helping the community, and they don’t even get to go to 2-3 sessions!  I’m really looking forward to these sessions:

• 1pm – Donald Farmer on integrating analytics with your data.  You know Donald by now from the keynote demos.
• 2:30pm – Linchi Shea on server benchmarking.  If you use storage area networking or if you want to wring the most performance possible out of your servers, watch his session even if you have to see it later on DVD.  He does great work, and reading about his experiments will help you perform your own testing in-house.  His work helped me get started with SAN testing.
• 4pm – Michael Ruthruff on SQL Server in Hyper-V.  I’ve dabbled in Hyper-V but haven’t gotten too deep.  I managed VMware farms, so I’m more comfortable with that, but I’m interested to hear about the results in Hyper-V.

See you around the summit!

I’ll be liveblogging this morning’s keynotes at the PASS Summit.  Refresh this page for the latest news.

10:02 – Tom’s focusing on the ROI of BI, and suddenly I get it.  The database engine works great.  Now we’re bolting things on top of it to make every end user in the company see the value of using SQL Server as their engine.  Before things like this, you could have swapped back ends with MySQL, Oracle, whatever.  Now, end users will get real value out of using SQL Server as the engine.

10:01 – Kilimanjaro will include the self-service analysis in Gemini, plus the self service reporting, collaboration and management inside Sharepoint.  Interesting – that’s like the SQL 2005 SP2 approach they took with SSRS integration in Sharepoint!

10:00 – Donald just joked about how Gemini isn’t Jim and I, and he said, “Thanks to Joe Webb for that one.”  Holy cow – what a funny use of Twitter to bond with your audience.  Andy Leonard said, “I got goosebumps!”

9:59 – showed an absolutely unbelievable time lapse graph in Sharepoint to show application popularity,  The more popular it got, the graphs moved around and showed interest.  Totally stunning.  That one graph will sell deployments.

9:55 – Donald’s showing Sharepoint as the consumer tool for SQL Server Analysis Services the same way it became for SSRS in SQL 2005 SP2.  One thing to manage.  Absolutely beautiful graphs.  I don’t use Sharepoint enough (nothing against it at all), but if it looks this good, I’ll be all over it.

9:53 – The promise of Gemini is two-fold: end user empowerment, and tracking and management for IT.  Bringing control and accountability into the system so that we can embrace it with the right management and control.  Gemini refers to the twins, and we’re about to see the second half of the twin.

9:48 – Talking about putting BI in context, delivering it as a smaller piece of a bigger application.  I’m thinking of Amazon’s “people who bought this also bought” and I like that approach.  Now wrapping up and going to spend 10-15 minutes with Donald Farmer.

9:43 – Think bigger about BI, they say: bigger deployments, bigger data volumes, better TCO, end user empowerment, etc.  This plays right into the Excel deployment of BI.  If you want to grow the BI deployment rate, you make it a part of a really common tool like that.

9:40 – Tom’s slide made a great point about SQL Server DBAs: “You are on your way to becoming a BI expert.”  Great point because it’s the same toolset we use for tiny OLTP systems versus huge BI systems.  All of your skills are applicable.

9:37 – Donald Farmer pointed out that she’s building reports against a nearly 2 terabyte cube.  Yes, but that doesn’t make it any more exciting.  It’s still watching a report being built.  If you want excitement, just show the report run, like the DATAllegro demo yesterday.

9:34 – Watching someone else build a report is like watching paint dry.  Carolyn’s a good presenter, doing a good job of showing it, but – jeeez, this is some boring content for this audience.  Well, for me anyway.

9:28 – SSRS 2005’s Report Builder started to democratize the development of reports, but Carolyn Chau is now on stage to show us how Report Builder 2.0 is easier.  Designed around the Office 2007 ribbon UI.

9:27 – Focusing on large data warehouse tools and benchmarks, like the Unisys load of 1.1 terabytes in under 30 minutes.  Oracle and Informatica’s record was 45 minutes for 1tb.

9:25 – Tom is talking about the scale-up story.  5% of data warehouses are 25tb or more, and SQL Server 2008 focused on that.  Those job skills are safe, he says, despite the DATAllegro acquisition.

9:22 – Donald Farmer is sending tweets live during the keynote, responding to the community.  I really applaud that – it makes the keynote so much more interactive and personal.  Plus, keep in mind that Twitter isn’t a Microsoft tool.  That kind of personal commitment is awesome.

9:20 – Tom explains that these tools make BI more continuous and interactive so that BI isn’t done by specialized professionals, it’s done by everyone.  I would agree, but I would clarify that end users are CONSUMING it, not “doing” it.  Otherwise, this is great.

9:17 – Demoing PerformancePoint-based dashboards, Live search integrated with a map, communication between management to set expectations.  This screams consulting dollars.

9:13 – While Tom talked about BI for everyone and BI being pervasive, the demo is clearly not built by end users.  They can slice and dice, but we’re still talking about an application that’s set up and modeled by BI professionals.  Whew.  Our jobs are safe.

9:10 – Bruno’s showing a single web browser with his contacts, his email, his My Documents, his dashboard, etc. It’s like a collapsed version of Office that centers on you and your work, NOT which application you’re in.  Interesting.

9:08 – Bruno Aziza, Business Architect in Enterprise Marketing is showing off Contoso Oil & Gas BI demo with Sharepoint, search, BI, PerformancePoint and more.  He’s playing operations manager of oil rigs in North America.

9:05 – Tom’s talking about BI for everyone, specifically giving people actionable information.  They’re going to talk about the second half of the twin (Gemini) that relates to us IT professionals.

9:03 – Tom Casey is onstage talking about the 136 chapters of PASS with 32,500 members in 38 countries.

9:00 – PASSion Award Winner of 2008 is Kathi Kellenberger!

8:56 – You can try out SQL Server 2008 at http://www.sqlpass.org/hostedtrial.  Get a free account and play around with it without installing anything.  Powered by Dell, MaximumASP and Microsoft.

8:55 – Announcing PASSPort, a new tool in the virtual SQL Server community that helps you connect, share, learn and be recognized by other SQL Server professional.  Rushabh’s showing it and it looks pretty interesting.

8:52 – The new SQLPass.org site is out of beta.  It features hundreds of hours of presentation content.  I love this.

8:50 – 92% of the revenue comes from this conference – 72% from the summit, 14% from the expos & sponsorship.  Despite a bad economy, they’re projecting a pretty hefty growth – from $2.6m in FY 2008 to $4.3m in FY 2009.

8:45 – Rushabh’s going through housekeeping stuff about PASS – the parties tonight, financial statements, etc.

8:40 AM – Rushabh Mehta just arrived onstage on a Vespa.  Carrying on a conversation with an offscreen narrator about being jealous of Donald Farmer’s hair.

Aside from my liveblog of Ted Kummert’s keynote this morning and Jimmy May’s presentation on partition alignment, a few other things caught my eye today.

I talked to JC Cannon about his SQL Server 2008 Compliance Guide.  I’ve written here about it before, but it bears repeating.  If you’re not here at PASS, and you wish you were, you can get a taste of the educational experience by going through that guide.  It’s extremely well-written, and like I told JC, when I think of an example about how whitepapers should be written, that one leaps immediately to mind.  You can learn a heck of a lot from that, and it’s f-r-e-e.  Go read it.

Keynote DBA Star Ayad Shommout’s SQL 2008 Experiences

I talked to Ayad Shommout, lead DBA for CareGroup Healthcare Systems, to get more information about his SQL Server 2008 upgrade experiences that he’d discussed during the keynote.  He uses clusters in conjunction with database mirroring, so he used a rolling upgrade process: fail over to the mirror, upgrade the cluster, and fail back.  The whole process involves less than a minute of downtime.  I’d heard that before from sales & marketing, but this was the first time I’d heard someone who’d done it on a wide scale in production.  Ayad’s environment is a perfect fit for 2008: healthcare, mission criticality, encryption needs, you name it, there’s a 2008 feature for him.

Ayad was also in on the server management tools that were covered in today’s keynote because he’s a part of a Microsoft early adopter program.  We talked a little about our hopes and dreams for the future of SQL Server management.

The Future of SQL Server Management

Based on what we saw today, I would really encourage DBAs to start looking closer at virtualization.  The DAC concept – packaging databases, dependencies and connection name into a single deployable package – means that it will be easier to move database applications from one server to another without changing the application.  In a sense, that’s virtualization, much like the instance concept is to some degree virtualization.  We’ve got virtual servers from Hyper-V and VMware, virtual storage from tools like IBM SVC, virtual databases from HP PolyServe and now SQL Server itself is moving towards abstracting away the underlying hardware.

Cloud-Based Business Intelligence

I gave a very sparsely attended presentation on using cloud-based BI to interpret Profiler and Perfmon results,and I mean sparsely.  I knew I was up against a lot of great competition – heck, ***I*** wanted to leave and watch Donald Farmer’s BI Power Hour – but I pitched in to help cover a speaker who couldn’t make it.  There was some mild interest in the technology, but the audience really grasped the security issue.

BI in the cloud, or even just databases in the cloud period, is one hell of a tough sale to professional database administrators.  They make their livings wrestling with tough issues like good security, compliance, auditing and disaster recovery.  They know how difficult these things are to implement, and they won’t just take someone’s word that it’s implemented.  They’re just not interested in using it for private data, period.

The analysis on the vendor side is that sooner or later, the cost will get so cheap that it will be a business decision, not a technology decision.  Maybe executives will mandate the use of cheaper resources, or maybe mid-level managers will just whip out their credit cards and handle BI projects on the sly.  Whatever it is, DBAs are not begging for the ability to do stuff in the cloud yet.

It’s a tough sell to DBAs, so who’s it an easy sell to?  Who wants this stuff?  I’ve had this discussion a few times with different folks this week, and there’s an apparent barrier to entry that’s pretty high.  People don’t understand how analytics works – real predictive analytics, data mining and whatnot.  I know – I’ve picked up data mining 101 books and put them down a few days later feeling like an idiot.  Analytics is really powerful, analytics is really enabling, but how do you wrap it in an experience that end users will embrace?  I dunno.  I’m just a guy who writes blogs and Twitters.

SSIS Task for Twitter

Andy Leonard and Jessica Moss gave a great presentation on using SSIS to send and receive Twitter messages.  (That CodePlex code is awaiting approval as of this writing, but will be live shortly.)  I was on the edge of my seat, along with fellow Tweeps Jason Cumberland and Paul Waters.

The rest of the class was, ah, shall we say, reserved.  The room was absolutely packed, standing room only, but people were practically mute.  Jason and I busted out clapping at a couple of points.  Wayne Snyder’s remarks this morning about it not being a zombie conference weren’t entirely accurate.  I think the DBAs only light up after 5pm when the drinks start flowing, like at the…

SQLServerPedia.com Launch Party

I talk up our marketing team a lot, and here it goes again.  The SQL Server marketing team at Quest are rock stars.  The party was a ton of fun, and packed in a lot of really good people with great conversations. I talked to a bunch of people I’ve met online over the years, people I’ve never had the chance to meet in person, and way more people than I can even list here.  My brain is fried!

We talked shop, we talked hobbies, we talked politics, and more.  Especially politics.

You, dear reader, have probably not voted yet.  Get your lazy rear over to a voting kiosk at PASS and take just a couple of minutes to vote.  Seriously, it’s important.  It may not be important to you, but it’s ridiculously important to the people who are running.  I’ve endorsed Douglas McDowell and Tom LaRock, and these guys are just biting their nails.  Go get to a kiosk and cast your vote, because they really want your help in getting elected.  Even if it doesn’t mean anything to you, it means a lot to them, and it means a lot to me.  These guys really do care.

Don’t believe me?  Go watch the PASS Board candidate videos.  These people want your vote.

I’m liveblogging the keynote this morning on here and on my Twitter feed.  Go to this page and refresh it periodically to get the latest news as it happens.  Updates are at the top of the page to make reading easier during liveblogs, and I’ll reverse it tonight for easier reading later.

10:08 – And that’s it!  Done.  See you at PASS!

10:06 – Donald got a great reaction from the attendees.  Kummert’s thanking the DBAs.  Kilimanjaro (with Gemini) and Madison will be coming in the first half of calendar year 2010.  Next major release of SQL Server will be coming 24-36 months from the release of SQL 2008.

10:03 – Judging by the reaction from bloggers and Twitterers, they’re genuinely surprised by the Project Gemini stuff.  Hello, welcome to last month.

10:00 – Donald Farmer walks onstage with fairy wings as part of the fairy tale.  He’s showing the 10-million-row demo of Gemini, sorting instantly on a laptop machine.

9:57 – Talking about enabling the SSAS-style experience inside Excel, and why end users don’t want to learn star schemas or dimensional models, they just want to get the job done. Amen – that’s my session today at PASS.  Kilimanjaro runs on a column-based storage (fast fast fast).  BI utility hosted within Sharepoint.

9:52 – Ted replayed the “Once Upon a Time” story he gave at PASS.  I’ll forgive him because it’s so good.  It basically talks about how IT can’t answer end user needs fast enough.  Donald Farmer coming out to demo managed self-service BI, aka Project Gemini, next.

9:50 – He’s bringing developers up to speed on the Azure announcements from PDC.  Will be exposing all of the data services over time, and will be moving forward very rapidly.  The first CTP of SQL Data Services is now available. (Could have sworn this was out at PDC.)

9:47 – DAC demos over, and Kummert’s talking about deploying databases to the cloud.  “You should be able to leverage your knowledge and investments to deploy in the cloud.”  It’s a statement about tools and about capabilities.

9:46 – Applications will get a “friendly name” for a connection string – somewhat like DNS.  That means you can move DACs around without breaking applications.

9:45 – They’re suggesting (but not specifically saying it) that there’s some change management inside the DAC process.  Admins can specify requirements of a DAC of things like SQL Server versions & editions, performance needs, etc.  A data warehouse would have different requirements than a small OLTP app, for example.

9:44 – SSMS can connect to an existing database, reverse engineer it into a DAC Pack and include the schema, plus things outside the database like logins.  Didn’t mention code, of course.

9:42 – Inside SQL Server Management Studio, there’s a new view called the Fabric Explorer that connects to a Fabric Control Point to show a dashboard of your instances.  you can see the utilization, health, trending, and more for each instance.  Helps you decide where to deploy DACs, and see which DACs need to be moved to other parts of the fabric.  There’s a build system in Visual Studio to build the DAC Pack.

9:41 – The DAC is a package of deployment requirements: schema, prereqs, things the application needs from the fabric in order to get deployed.

9:40 – Dan talks about how we manage instance by instance right now, not as an enterprise.  Need the ability to manage our servers in pools: the SQL Server Fabric.

9:39 – Talking about the ability to deploy applications as a package, along with its prerequisites.  The “down payment” will be released as a part of Kilimanjaro.  Welcoming Dan Jones to cover it.

9:37 – Demo over.  Switching to management: discovery, transparency, deployments based on policy, improved utilization in Kilimanjaro.

9:33 – Demo uses SSRS querying the cluster and the nodes go crazy.  Some nodes take longer to complete than others.  Says “It takes a minute for the tubes to warm up.”  HAHAHA, good one.  Nobody here got it though.

9:31 – Showing 7-table star schema.  Fact table has 1 trillion rows, 6 dimension tables, 150tb of data.  Tables are replicated across the nodes.  The dimension tables are copied to all nodes so that joins happen faster. Showing the system monitor with CPU/IO metrics they showed at PDC.  I love this demo visually.

9:30 – Showing a Dell 2950 reference architecture with one active/passive control node and a bunch of 2950 compute nodes, EMC on the back end.  Says they’re also working with HP gear too.

9:27 – DATAllegro will be integrated with the Microsoft BI stack. Now bringing Jesse Fountain, Principal Group Program Manager, Data and Storage Platforms Division to demo DATAllegro.

9:20 – Covering internal Microsoft implementations of 2008.  Couple of 1tb SSAS cubes, big 30+tb data warehouses.

9:19 – Ted’s saying they’re seeing unprecedented adoption of SQL Server 2008.

9:16 – Ted brought on Ayad Shommout, lead DBA for CareGroup Healthcare Systems, to talk about their experiences with the SQL 2008 upgrade.  He’s a great customer for that – they have HIPAA needs, which is a good fit for SQL 2008’s features: auditing, encryption, policy-based management, etc.

9:12 – Talking about the new features of SQL 2008 based on the four pillars – enterprise platform, beyond relationship, dynamic development and pervasive insight.  This slide was cool when I first saw it in, when was it high school, but now…

9:08 – New version of DATAllegro will ship in first half of 2010.

9:06 – If you interact with Microsoft folks in the official MS shirts, they’ll give you SQL Server Bucks.  You can redeem those at the end of the conference for a free car.  Okay, well, for something maybe.

9:04 – Ted: “We shipped SQL 2008 in August.  And I’m glad, otherwise you might be listening to someone else speak up here.”

9:03 – Video playing about how the PASS community helps build the product.  Donald Farmer talking about Gemini as the future of business intelligence.  I’m psyched, and Ted Kummert just walked onstage.  Walked?  What, no Vespa?

9:01 – Wayne introducing Ted Kummert, Corporate VP of Data and Storage Platform Division from Microsoft.  Forgives him for working for Apple.  (Between that and Wayne’s jokes about tweets, I think he needs to get some schooling on social media, but I’ll forgive that!)

9:00 – Wayne says to support the vendors because they’re supporting you, and they have tools to make your life easier.  I say to support the vendors because I want a Porsche 911.  The choice is yours.

8:55 – Registration up 60%.  Summit at 2,445, up from 1,528.  Precons at 1,143 up from 732.  If growth continues we’ll max out this facility next year.  Even though other conferences are having problems attracting visitors, PASS is growing.

8:50 – Wayne thanking the PASS Board and past president Kevin Kline for their tireless efforts. I gotta track down Christoph Stoltz and thank him for being such a kick-ass host when I spoke in Germany.

8:48 – Jeremiah Peschka is also liveblogging the keynote. (I got your name right this time, man.)

8:45 – 2008 accomplishments for PASS included the site relaunch of www.SQLPass.org, hundreds of hours of online video, free members, increased number of chapters.

8:40 – Wayne’s talking about the PASS Board’s mission to facilitate member networking, passing knowledge on from one DBA to another.  Talking about how some conferences are “zombie conferences” where you go from one session to the next, go back to your hotel room alone and be quiet.  PASS is not that conference.

8:37 AM – Born to be Wild music video playing to warm up the crowd.  Wayne Snyder rides onstage on a motorcyle and takes off a leather jacket.

PASS Election Update

I’m seeing a theme on the interwebz: lots of endorsements for Andy Warren and Tom LaRock:

• Andy Leonard posted his vote on Twitter for Andy Warren, Lynda Rab and Tom LaRock (SQLBatman).
• Brian Kelley posted his endorsements on SQLServerCentral for Andy Warren and Tom LaRock.
• Steve Jones posted his endorsements on SQLServerCentral for Andy Warren, Louis Davidson (DrSQL) and Tom LaRock.

Tom has pledged to get a tattoo if he gets elected to the board.  C’mon, folks: do your part to help a DBA come home from a convention with a tattoo.  Give him something to explain to the wife – or as he calls her, Congress.

Stickers Are Here!

I picked up a SQLBatman sticker from Tom LaRock and a SQLServerPedia sticker from Christian Hasker.  If you want a SQLServerPedia sticker, swing by the Quest Software booth at PASS and ask for an invite to the SQLServerPedia launch party tomorrow night.

Thoughts from the Quest Customer Advisory Board Members

We spent all day talking shop with customers, and I obviously can’t blog about everything, but there’s a few juicy nuggets that you might like.  We’ve got a wide variety of customers involved, from shops like Michael Deputy‘s with only one DBA all the way up to global financial companies.  It’s fun to peek into their shops to get ideas about trends like these:

Dev/test SQL Servers on VMware and Hyper-V are very commonplace. Everybody’s doing it for cost savings, space/power/cooling savings in the datacenter, consolidation, etc.  Production servers aren’t quite as common – the DBAs were dead-set against it except for small implementations, like say a standalone Microsoft TFS server.

Remote DBA firms still aren’t catching on. One customer is augmenting his staff with offsite DBA help, but just one.  I think the DBA job lends itself well to remote work, but remote workers outside of the company seems to be a problem.

DBAs get bad products shoved down their throats by project managers. PM’s will go buy crappy applications that violate all kinds of company standards, but by the time the DBA gets handed the CD, it’s too late.  The millions have been spent and the DBA just has to suck it up and live with it.  I’m not surprised at all by this – it echoes my personal experiences.  One DBA team had the ability to kibosh projects because they were involved early enough in the project planning lifecycle, but they were the clear minority.

SQL Server 2008 is finding its way into production. Early adopters talked about problems with third party application compatibility, especially around data modelers.  They also had issues with vendors who said they supported 2008, but they did it by removing features.

SQL Server 2005 training is still in demand. DBAs said they can leverage any newly acquired SQL 2005 skills on SQL 2008 anyway, so why not keep getting 2005 training that they can use against all of their 2005 and 2008 servers?  SQL 2008 BI training is another story, though.

At the risk of sounding sales-y, even our customers don’t know all our features. We came out with LiteSpeed 5.0 a few months ago, and customers were surprised that our object-level recovery works against both LiteSpeed backups and native backups without any tweaks at backup time.  Booyah.

My podcasts are way the hell too long. Tom LaRock told me this a while ago, and boy, did the customers echo that one.  I’ll be breaking up my podcasts into 5-10 minute chunks for easier viewing.

Other PASS Summit News

Recaps have been posted today by:

• Andy Leonard
• Jeremiah Peschka (who won second place at the quiz bowl!)
  

I’ve noticed a lot of PASS people signing up for Twitter.  That’s a great sign, because if they stick with it, it means more transparency to PASS.  I love the immediacy and the community that Twitter brings, and Jason Massie should be proud of starting his SQL Server Twitter list.  It’s bringing people together, as cheesy as that sounds.

Plus, I think the Twitter buzz is working for positive marketing: I’ve seen people tweet that they wish they were here, or that they’ll be coming next year, or that they’re anxious for more info about the event.  That means we’re doing a good job of conveying how much fun it is to be here.

Tonight, I’m missing out on a ton of good dinners and parties (especially the PASS Quiz Bowl), but I gotta make the donuts.  I’m presenting on how to data mine your Perfmon and Profiler results with SQL Server Data Mining in the Cloud.  I gave a similar presentation a couple of times a few months ago, but I’m going to kick it up a notch for my first PASS session.  BAM!

Tomorrow morning, I’ll be liveblogging the Ted Kummert keynote.  I’ll start a blog entry here and publish it, and save it every minute or two with the latest info.  You’ll be able to reload the page to see what’s going on.  I’ll also be covering it via Twitter, and you don’t have to use Twitter to get the updates.  Just go to my Twitter page and reload it every minute or two when the keynote starts around 9AM PST.

Great SSIS Boot Camp by Brian Knight

Brian’s a fantastic presenter – really funny, really engaging, and can answer questions on his feet.  The one-day presentation was a great way to get started, and I ordered his Professional SSIS 2008 book to answer my questions as I start digging into SSIS.

One indicator of a good presentation style: people follow along and ask questions, and the presenter’s answer is, “I’m glad you asked.  We’re talking about that next.”  That happened again and again in Brian’s presentation.

DBAs asked a ton of questions around SQL Server 2008’s Change Data Capture as the engine implemented it, but they didn’t relate to SSIS.  There seemed to be some basic disbelief about its reliability given that it’s implemented as a SQL Server Agent job: people wanted to know if the job would stop, what would happen if it stopped, what would happen if the log rolled over, etc.  There’s some concern around what happens with schema changes as well: evidently you have to disable CDC, make your schema changes, and then reestablish CDC.

Geeks Roam Seattle with Cameras

A few DBAs did a photo walk: roaming the city looking for interesting subjects to photograph.  Tim Ford’s pictures of Seattle are up on Flickr, and we’ll probably see some more sets emerge over the coming days.  It’s really hard to do photo postprocessing in the midst of a bunch of parties, so I certainly understand why he’s the only one who’s put it together so far.  (Frankly, I don’t quite understand how HE even did it.)

Drinks & Dinner with the Quest Software Customer Advisory Board

As I write this, I’ve spent the last four hours catching up with Quest employees and customers.  Quest is huuuge, spread out all over the world, and it’s so much fun to get a handful of people together in a bar to talk shop.  We had some hilarious stories about customers, vendors, and war stories.  My Twitter stream has been silent for the last few hours, and now you know why.  Wish I could have “OH” tweeted this stuff, but I like my job.  (A lot.)

Douglas McDowell and I had a great discussion about the mechanics of the StackOverflow reputation system.  Online reputations and credibility are going to be a big part of what makes any online community successful: people react differently (and with more maturity) when they know their online reputation sticks with them and is measured in clear, easy-to-define statistics.  I’m all about the Whuffie Factor.

I talked at length with both Douglas and Tom LaRock (SQLBatman) about the PASS Board elections.  I can’t emphasize enough that you should talk to them personally before you cast your vote.  Just walk right up to them and say, “I hear you’re running for PASS.  Why are you doing it, and why should I cast a vote?”  Historically, PASS election turnout has been pretty low, and it’s a shame.  PASS voting isn’t even like political elections in that it doesn’t even require leaving your house – it only involves a few mouse clicks.  Go get clickin’, and tell your friends.

Tomorrow: Quest CAB, a few parties

The Questies are doing an all-day series of meetings at the Hotel 1000, and the evening holds a few choices:

• 6pm – the official PASS reception party with the infamous Quiz Bowl
• 8pm – SQLServerCentral’s casino party in rooms 615-618 at the Convention Center

Bookmark Rob Boek’s PASS 2008 event calendar to stay up to date on your party options.  If you know a Solid Quality Mentors person, you might ping them to see what they’re up to tomorrow night too, but you didn’t hear that from me….

Update – Monday Recap from Jeremiah Peschka

Jeremiah, also known as @peschkaj on Twitter, posted his PASS Summit Monday Recap.

Yesterday, Andy Leonard and Jessica Moss announced that their Wednesday 3pm class on SSIS scripting will cover Twitter integration. In today’s SSIS Boot Camp by Brian Knight, I spoke with some DBAs about the Twitter idea.  The initial reaction has been, “Why would you want to do that?  Twitter is so unreliable.”

True: us database administrators are conditioned to working with extremely reliable tools, logged transactions, mission-critical uptime, yadda yadda yadda.  Twitter is none of those things – so why would we rely on it?

After they stop to think about it for a minute, there’s been some interesting use cases come up:

Tiny daily status reports to the public – say you’re a fundraising group like United Way, and you want to let your followers know how close you are to your fundraising goals.  Or maybe you’re a blood bank, and you want to tell people which branches are open or what types of blood you need most this week.  Tweets would be a great, free answer that scales pretty well, and it’s a pull-based setup where anyone can sign up without you writing a subscription interface.

Mini-reports of yesterday’s metrics for global users – same thing for companies, except you’d protect your Twitter feed.  You might send out a tweet each morning with a recap of whether we were on track for yesterday’s sales.  Imagine an automated tweet from the sales executive recapping yesterday’s sales vs goals.  Of course, keep security in mind – may just want to say, “Sales yesterday was 1.5% over goals!”, not actual sales numbers, even if your updates are protected.

“Interesting record” alerts – if you’re running a kick-ass IT question & answer site, you may end up with users who can’t wait to find out when their question is updated – but they only want to know when they’re online.  I could easily see value in setting up an SSIS/Twitter integration on StackOverflow.com so that when any of my posts are edited, or when someone answers my questions, it sends me a tweet.  It wouldn’t clutter up my inbox, and it’d only show up when I’m online.  (Or if I was a hard-core geek, I could set up Twitter to text me when these come in, but I’m not that hard-core.)

Deal alerts for your customers – Amazon posts sale alerts when items go on sale in their MP3 store.  Check out the AmazonMP3 Twitter feed for an idea.  We could set up automated jobs to take the items in our inventory that have the highest in-stock amount but lowest volume, for example, and discount the price by x% to move it out.  Granted, you’d want to put a lot of business logic in there to make sure it doesn’t discount something that you don’t want to discount, but it’s an interesting way to try to move product.  Yes, you could do this in a separate application, too, but doing it entirely in SQL Server would be a fast way to get the job done.

Building Twitter bots for sales force automation – imagine a Tweet conversation where one of your salespeople could send Tweets to a bot connected to your CRM system or data warehouse:

• From @BrentO: “@QuestBot whois Jane Doe”
• From @QuestBot: “@BrentO Jane Doe, ABC Consult., Boston, last order 9/10/08, $10m, rep John Smith”

Of course, you’d probably want to do this via private direct messages, not public messages, but you get the idea.  It’s a fast way of building a web-service-style CRM system without a lot of infrastructure.

Data mining your Tweeps – you can’t really follow more than a couple hundred people without losing Tweets, and even at that level, it takes a lot of time to digest your crowd.  I would love to see a summarized dashboard of activity from yesterday with what keywords were popping up, what links were sent out, who else my followers are talking to (so I can maybe find more interesting people), and so on.  I know I can do that if I can get everything into SQL Server, and this would probably be the first thing I’ll try to accomplish.

I’m way excited about this – can’t wait for Wednesday’s session.  3pm.  Be there or be square.

I flew in yesterday and spent some quality time with some other folks who were lucky enough to fly in early, and by “quality time” I mean eating and drinking.  I only got a handful of photos.

Listening In on DBA Conversations

The funnier momentos were the things we overheard.  If you follow me on Twitter, “OH” means “Overheard”, and we type that when somebody won’t want to be identified by the quote.  Some examples:

• OH: “My wife makes hamburger cake.”    “We call that meatloaf.”
• OH: “Do you like ginger?”     “The root or the Gilligan’s Island castaway?”
• OH #sqlpass “I’ve never done it with a real girl before in a room full of people.”

If you want to follow up on the minute-by-minute news from the DBAs gathered in Seattle for the Summit, use search.twitter.com and search for #sqlpass.  You don’t have to use Twitter in order to hit that link – you can just go there and refresh it from time to time to see what’s going on.  If somebody posts a lot of interesting updates, follow ’em and you’ll probably like their updates outside of the PASS conference too.  Plus they won’t always remember to use the “#sqlpass” tag.

The PASS Board Elections are On

The emails went out last night inviting PASS members to vote.  If you’re in Seattle, I would wait to vote until you’ve talked to a few of the candidates.  They’re going to be all over the place, and if you see one, just start a conversation – “So, what are you going to give me for my vote?” That works.

To find out where they’re at, follow them on Twitter:

• Andy Warren (not on Twitter…yet!)
• Douglas McDowell @DouglasMcDowell
• Louis Davidson @DRSql
• Lynda Rab (not on Twitter…yet!)
• Pat Wright @SQLAsylum
• Thomas LaRock @SQLBatman

Monday’s Activities

I’ll be at Brian Knight’s SSIS Boot Camp today.  Say hi if you see me.  I probably won’t be tweeting as much since I’ll be soaking up knowledge like a sponge.

Tim Ford and a few other photo-savvy DBAs are doing a photo walk around Seattle.  They’re meeting up in the Sheraton lobby at 8:30 AM.  If you’d like to join in, go over there and look for the guys with shooting pictures of everything that moves or doesn’t move.  They’re friendly people, don’t worry.

PASS Volunteers have a welcome reception tonight that starts around 6:30PM – I don’t have the location.  I’ll be at a private Quest Software dinner tonight.

PASS has posted the list of candidates, but there’s no bio info yet.  Fear not – the community is doing a great job of not just keeping up, but getting ahead!  I love communities in the age of social networking.

TJay Belt is doing a great job of centralizing information about the candidates for PASS Board. Check out these two posts:

• PASS Board of Directors Candidates – lists each candidate’s blog, Twitter, etc
• PASS Board Candidate Challenge – TJay posted a list of questions & topics, and the candidates are responding

Bookmark those pages and check them before you vote – I’m sure they’ll be updated as more candidates blog their answers.  Andy Warren just posted a fantastic article about why he wants to be on the PASS Board that’s really worth a read.

When I was a DBA, before I got this “rock star” job, I didn’t have the time to get involved enough with the SQL Server community to really know the people running for the PASS Board.  I had a “real job”, and when I cast my vote, I was basing my decision off a paragraph or two of information about the candidate.

Now that I have a “fake job” where I get to spend time in the SQL Server community, I have the time to get to know more people.  If I was you, and I had a “real job”, I would want to hear a personal opinion about the candidates.

So here’s who I’m voting for:

Tom LaRock, aka SQLBatman.com

Yes, I just outed SQLBatman on my blog, but if I was a voter, I’d want to know the man behind the mask.

Tom is funny as hell, as evidenced by his virtual campaign poster.  I first met him at a Quest event for customers, and we hit it off right away.  Everybody found it easy to talk to Tom – he’s a natural conversationalist – and to me, that’s really important in a SQL Server community leadership position.  You want a person in there who you can just walk right up to, start asking questions, and get relaxed, funny answers.

He ran into problems with one of my favorite Quest products, but he didn’t just say, “This thing is borked” and throw it back at us.  He took the time to trace the SQL the product was running, look at how it was working, and suggest a couple of indexes that would improve performance under load.  He implemented it on his own lab systems, tested it, DOCUMENTED it, and passed it on to us.  He documented it.  Think about that for a second.  How many of us write documentation on our OWN stuff, let alone a vendor’s?!?

His attitude shows in his written communications, too.  Check out Tom’s Twitter stream.  Regardless of whether or not you use Twitter, you have to appreciate how involved he is with other SQL Server professionals, and how easy he is to work with.

That right there – the Twittering and blogging – are big reasons that I’m endorsing Tom LaRock for PASS Board.  I think it’s important for the future of PASS that we bring more DBAs closer together because it gets our SQL Server questions answered faster and makes our jobs easier.  At the end of the day, that’s why I get involved with the community – to help other people get their jobs done easier – and I think Tom does too.

When Tom told me he was running, I asked him a few questions about why he was running, whether or not he’d have the time, and so on.  We had so much fun that he asked if he could combine the emails into a blog post about why he’s running for PASS Board.

Douglas McDowell, Solid Quality Mentors

Disclaimer: I’ve never met Douglas in person, only over the phone.  He may smell like a Newark telephone booth on a hot day.  I reserve the right to revoke this endorsement should I determine that to be the case.

I first interacted with Douglas only recently – when we asked him if he’d like to be the BI Editor at SQLServerPedia.  Of course we picked him for the quality of his work and his track record with the SQL Server community, but that’s not why I’m endorsing him here, because all of the nominees have awesome track records.

I’m endorsing Douglas because of a skill he’s repeatedly demonstrated in every interaction we’ve had: the ability to quickly dissect topics he doesn’t normally deal with, find the problems, and communicate them in a non-threatening way.  He really displays an analytical mind that doesn’t just try to comprehend what you’re saying, but what you’re NOT saying, and what made you come to your conclusion.

That’s important to me in a PASS Board member because board members have to deal with a lot of ideas coming from every direction.  It can be an exhausting job of taking suggestions that might be brilliant – or really crappy – and they have to figure out the right direction to take the SQL Server community.  That’s why I’m voting for Douglas.

What About The Other PASS Board Candidates?

They’re awesome.  Seriously.  There’s nothing negative I can say about the rest of the nominee list – these are all people who devote their time to educating and serving the community.  There’s other people in my circle of friends that are going to vote for other people.  I know Andy Warren’s gathered a lot of buzz, and very rightfully so – read Andy’s blog entries about the PASS process, and you have to love the transparent approach he takes with it.  There are a lot of good people who want to help others by serving as a PASS Board member, and we have the luxury of choosing from great candidates.  (Sure beats the political elections I’m used to.)

If I had something negative to say about any of the candidates, believe me, I’d say it.  Don’t believe me?  Go search the web for SQL Server 2008 sucks and see who comes up.

How to Vote for PASS Board Members

Check out this page explaining the PASS Board of Directors election process. If you get an email, vote.  If you’re in Seattle for PASS, swing by the voting kiosks.  But whatever you do, vote, because it really does make a difference – last year, the difference between winning and not was 13 votes.