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I bought a Microsoft Zune 8 to test the new SQLServerPedia video podcasts and the user experience was so unpolished, so unprofessional that I just had to bang out a blog about it.  Looking at the iPod Nano next to the Zune 8, I could never understand why somebody would buy the Zune 8.  Now having used both of them, it makes even less sense.

Forget the bulky size of the device.  Forget the user interface.  Check out the software.  Brand new Zune fresh out of the box, brand new install of the Zune software, connect them together and:

Kablammo.  Okay, okay, no problem, I’ll reboot.  I know how this stuff works.

After a reboot and some black magic, I got it installed.  Great, now I’ll log in.  The window tells me to put in my user name and my password, so I do that, and:

Wait – the error says you want my email address, not the user name I just set up.  Fix your login screen.  And hey, while you’re at it, can you get rid of all the empty space across the bottom?  It looks like I bought the stripper version with no options, and I’m missing a bunch of option boxes or something.  Or maybe you’re being “artsy”.  Whatever.

Poor decisions on screen space abound throughout the program.  Check out this screenshot:

Big huge window, tons of white space, and they choose to cram the message into a tiny messagebox in the middle of the screen and put a scroll bar on it.  Why do I need to scroll through a message when you have all this white space all over the screen?  You think I want to concentrate on the white space?  Is the message that bad that you don’t want me to see it?

Now let’s test those podcasts.  I set up the Zune one-click subscription link (rather spiffy), subscribe to the podcasts and watch the downloads start.  Nice download progress bars – or are they?

Both progress bars are gradients, and they don’t change as the download changes?  The 27% bar and the 10% bar look exactly the same.  I’m not sure what you call the opposite of a progress bar, but that’s what this is.

I was going to keep this thing after I tested our podcasts because I really wanted to give it a shot, but every time I interact with it, it makes my blood pressure rise.  I can EXPENSE this thing as a part of my job, and I STILL won’t keep it – it’s going back to the store tomorrow.

During the several times I had to reboot to get it to work, I ran across an absurdly in-depth review of the Zune 8 versus the iPod Nano.  Read that, and you’ll get a good idea of what a train wreck this thing is.

I’m going to show how to use a new feature in SQL Server 2008 Management Studio: the ability to query groups of servers simultaneously.

In Registered Servers, right-click on a group of servers and click New Query. What comes up will look like a normal query window, but pay close attention to the very bottom of the screen after we run a query:

“Group L” shows the name of my registered server group. I keep my lab servers in Group L for Lab.

“LAB\Administrator” is the login that was used for authentication. (Okay, you caught me, I’m logging in as the domain admin. Thank goodness this isn’t a blog post about security.)

“Master” is the database, of course, and it would make sense to use Master because it’s one of the few databases we know exist on every server.

“6 rows” is obviously the number of rows the query returned, but let’s take a look at the query and the number of rows:

I ran a “SELECT GETDATE()” against this group of servers, and SQL Server Management Studio did the hard work for me: it connected to every SQL Server in the group, ran that query, and then combined the results back into a single results grid. It automatically added a “Server Name” column at the beginning of my results to identify which server (and which instance) the results came from. If we ran a query that returned multiple rows per server, that would work fine too.

This query would be useful if we wanted to check the dates on all of our servers, but let’s be honest – that’s not a big problem for us database administrators. We’re geniuses.

Taking a SQL Server Inventory with SSMS 2008

Let’s go tackle a harder problem, like taking an inventory:

In the above example, I’ve grabbed the SQL Server version for each of my instances. Now we’re starting to get somewhere, but what we really want is the kind of detailed information we can get from sp_configure, so let’s see how that looks:

Now we’re cookin’ with gas – but wait. Look at that first column. We’re getting lots of data back, multiple rows for each server, and it’s hard to compare this data back and forth. For example, maybe I want to see whether “allow updates” is turned on for all of my servers – so I should probably sort by “name”, right?

Can’t Really Order By with SSMS 2008 Group Execute

Uh oh – turns out that doesn’t work. Remember, SQL Server Management Studio simply runs this same query on every single instance, then dumps the data into the SSMS results window. It doesn’t process the query results together. You can’t “join” between tables on different servers – well, you can, but you have to set up linked servers, and that doesn’t really have anything to do with the Group Execute functionality.

Another thing you’ll want to do is take this data and insert it into a table. Again, no dice there – if you try to insert this into a temp table like this:

SELECT @@SERVERNAME INTO #MyServerList

SSMS will execute that query on every single server, so every server will end up with its own temporary table with one record in it. Not exactly what you wanted.

Next up on our feature list: the ability to schedule these multi-server queries and take action on the results. I might want to run a query every night checking for failed jobs or sp_configure changes. Again, not going to happen – this can’t be automated with a SQL Server Agent job. This functionality only lives in SQL Server Management Studio.

Be Aware of Case Sensitive Collations

One more thing you want to be aware of: if any of your servers are case-sensitive, then you need to write all of your group execute queries in the proper case. I recommend that if you’ve got any case-sensitive instances, then use a case-sensitive instance as your personal testbed server like on your workstation. That way, as you’re writing new utility queries, you’ll know for sure that they’ll succeed on your case-sensitive instances. It’s a real pain to bang out a hundred-line utility query only to find out you’ve got case errors all over the place when you try to execute it.

It might sound like I’m down on this feature, but I’m not: it’s really useful. I love using it to quickly find out a piece of information across lots of servers, like find out if there’s any locking or deadlocks going on. It’s also really useful if you’ve implemented a Central Management Server as a centralized list of your instances. But it’s not a solution for automated reporting or proactive reporting.

Worry not – SQL Server 2008 has a different new feature specifically aimed at automated, proactive management: Policy-Based Management.  More on that later.

I haven’t been doing a lot of in-depth technical blogging here lately because I’ve been working on a very big problem: the state of SQL Server training today.  DBA training today has all kinds of problems:

I’d go buy a book, but books take forever to come out.

I’d like to learn about SQL Server 2008 now.  Like, right now.  Today.  So if I go to my local bookstore or to Amazon.com, I can buy books, but they’re half-baked and they don’t include any real-world implementation problems or howtos that have popped up since RTM.  People write books long before the final code is even deployed.  Heck, I’ve seen SQL 2008 books that don’t even call features by the right names, because the feature names like Policy-Based Management change during development!  By the time the right book is ready, my boss already wants things deployed.

I want to learn, but I don’t have the time to go to user group meetings.

SQL Server user groups like PASS are a great way to hear from smart presenters, but unfortunately these meetings only happen once a month, and even then they’re not always in the same city.  I was at the West Michigan SQL Server User Group and some of the attendees had traveled 45-60 miles just to get to the meeting.  I admire their dedication, but the only thing that makes me drive 45-60 miles after a long day of work is a hurricane evacuation, and even then only for a category 3 or above.

The economy sucks, and nobody’s got any budget money.

We all want to be able to further our DBA eduction, but budgets are getting cut like crazy.  We can’t all travel around to the latest and greatest conferences, and we can’t go out to a week-long boot camp that costs thousands of dollars.  At the same time, technology is marching forwards faster, and our training gets out of date fast.  So when I run into a SQL Server problem, what do I do?  I search the web.

It’s dangerous to take production SQL Server advice from “Surfer69”.

When I run into SQL Server problems, I end up Googling the web to find answers.  I might find a few forum posts from unknown people, or maybe some Experts Exchange threads.  Do I really want to try those solutions on my production SQL Servers?  Not really, especially not when they’re written by “BigFreddy22” or “HotMamma31”.  I want to know that the person on the other end actually knows what they’re doing, and that they’re a SQL Server professional, not a pimply-faced kid who’s giving bad answers as a joke or somebody who’s just reciting something they heard secondhand from a developer.

I want to be able to drill down into topics and learn more.

I want more than just a one-line answer that says, “Enable AWE.”  I want my junior DBAs to be able to see what AWE is, understand what it means, and see it in context of other SQL Server topics.  If the instructions call for them to rebuild an index, I want them to click on that instruction and see why indexes need to be rebuilt, and how to do it.  The more they drill into a topic, the more they understand the mechanics of SQL Server, and the better their code and their databases will perform.

Some topics are only halfway covered by a bunch of different sites.

I’ve gone to web pages and said, “Well, they’ve got most of it right, but they left off these three crucial details that make a world of difference in a good implementation.”  Sometimes I can leave a comment on those sites to enhance the content – but sometimes the author or blog doesn’t allow comments, like Books Online.  I don’t have the time to write complete articles from scratch every time the way I did with my SQL Server 2005 Setup Checklist, but sometimes I do have enough time to enhance somebody else’s coverage and make it better.

So with a lot of help, these problems are about to be solved.

I’m working with a team of great SQL Server experts to solve this problem for once and for all.  We’re going to change the way DBAs get answers, the way DBAs get trained and the way DBAs interact with each other.  Next Monday, I’ll explain it in detail, but for now, check out some of the guys helping to build it:

• Denny Cherry – DBA for over a decade, frequent blogger and user group speaker, Microsoft MVP
• Douglas McDowell – director of Business Intelligence at Solid Quality Learning, DouglasMcDowell on Twitter, Microsoft MVP
• Jason Massie – DBA for over a decade, StatisticsIO on Twitter, pens a SQL Server comic called Captain Varchar(MAX), Microsoft MVP
• Tim Ford – working with SQL Server over a decade, SQLAgentMan on Twitter, blogger and tip writer
• Tom LaRock – working with SQL Server over a decade, SQLBatman on Twitter, speaking at PASS

Want to meet your mostest favoritest Houston tweeps and talk trash about your leastest favoritest ones?  Coffee Groundz in Midtown is hosting a Twitter party on Sunday, November 2nd from 2pm to 6pm.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter or on BrightKite know that I’m here all the time – I’m typing this from Groundz as we speak.  I love this place for all kinds of reasons:

• They have plenty of electric outlets and free WiFi
• They have a great outdoor patio with lots of seating (AND outlets there too!)
• The morning staff are fun and friendly (can’t speak for the afternoon staff because I just grab a beer and go straight out to the patio)
• They serve surprisingly good sandwiches, plus gelato and smoothies
• They play fun music on XM, not dark or artsy stuff
• THEY HAVE A FULL BAR!  WOOHOO!  Not just Bud and vodka, but a great variety of beer and wine.

I’ll be here, and odds are there will be a ton of other interesting Tweeps here too.  I’ve met a ton of fun people on Twitter that I’ve got a lot in common with, and I know I always love getting the chance to meet them and shake their hands.  Or hug them.  Whatever.

If you like the place, follow them online to find out news like the Twitter party:

• http://twitter.com/CoffeeGroundz
• The Coffee Groundz group on Facebook
• BrightKite’s placestream for CoffeeGroundz

Psst – want $25 off the SSWUG Virtual Conference, bringing it down to only $75?

I got a promo email today from my employer (see, when it comes from the people who pay your check, you can’t call it “spam”) that says to enter VIPVC2510 in the VIP code field.  For all I know, this might be restricted to the first X people, so if it doesn’t work, it’s worth what you paid me for it.

Funny how this stuff works – I find out about some things via email because my personal email is still in the Quest customer database!

One of the sweet things about telecommuting is the ability to pack up the tents and head off to a new location for a while.  Erika’s never seen a real winter, so we’re moving up to my hometown of Whitehall, Michigan.  We’re staying in the Colby State Park – not a real state park, of course, but that’s the family nickname for Grandma & Grandpa Colby’s old house on White Lake.

It’s probably not permanent – we love Houston and warm weather too much to make it permanent.  It’s fun for a while, though.

Expect to see more white and less sun in my photo stream for a while!

Side note – if anybody wants to buy a Vizio 42″ 1080p flat panel with a long warranty, I’ll let it go for $600.  No shipping, local Houston buyers only.  Not really looking forward to putting that thing in storage with the rest of our furniture or moving it up to Michigan.  Update: the TV is sold to Jessica Grieves of Ecor Rouge Photography here in Houston, where it will be displaying beautiful baby pictures during the day and XBox games at night when her husband Jay plays with it.

I had a burst of creativity and suggested to my Twitter peeps that they write short IT horror stories, 140 characters or less, and identify them with #ITBoo.  You can find ’em here on Search.Twitter.com by searching for #ITBoo.

Tulsa Tech Fest is a ginormous cross-discipline tech event that drew over 800 people to two days of fun sessions at OSU-Tulsa.  I learned so much from so many different people that I can’t even begin to lay it all out, but I’m going to throw in the highlights here.

Tulsa developers “get” social media. During one of the keynotes, the speaker asked for a show of hands from everybody on Twitter, and something like 1 in 5 hands went up.  That’s way, way higher of a participation rate than I see when I ask that same question in other cities.  Then, add in the fact that Twitpic and Ping.fm are both born and raised in Tulsa.  Wow.

Ping.fm consists of two guys in Tulsa. Ping.fm is a service that broadcasts your status updates to all of the social networking sites you use – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and so on.  Post your update in one place, and boom, it goes out everywhere.  You can do updates via the web or via email, and if you attach a picture to your email, it handles that too.  Without Ping.fm, I wouldn’t be able to keep up with my friends on so many different social networks.  It works so well and stays up so much more than Twitter that it’s hard to believe it’s done by only two guys.  I met @seamoss and he’s totally down-to-earth.  If I ever started a site that cool, I’d be full of myself.  Heck, I’m full of myself now, and all I have is a blog!  Caught you reading it, though.  Heh.

People still believe virtual servers are smoke and mirrors. I gave a session on VMware and Hyper-V to an audience of people who hadn’t done any work with either platform yet.  About halfway through, I could tell that it wasn’t resonating with the audience, so I stopped and asked, “Okay, wait, how many of you actually believe me that this stuff works?  That say, VMotion works?”  The only raised hands were from the two guys in the audience who’d already done large (200+ host) VMware deployments.  I had to drop out of the slide deck, remote desktop into my lab, and show it in action.  Even then, they still didn’t seem to believe it.  Folks, this stuff is for real, and it’s coming fast.

Mint.com is a free web-based replacement for Quicken. I used to love Quicken, but it’s such a manual pain in the rear.  Mint screen-scrapes your bank’s web site, automatically categorizes your expenses based on the business name, and saves you money by suggesting things like cheaper insurance.  I’m sold.

Chris Bernard is a hell of a presenter. He’s a user experience evangelist for Microsoft, and his design experience carries over to his presentations.  He doesn’t keep turning around and pointing at the slide deck.  He doesn’t go “Uhhh, well, kinda, like, you know.”  He just bangs out his points, and the slides serve to illustrate what he’s talking about in amazing ways.  You can’t get the experience by watching Chris’s keynote on Slideshare, because like a good presenter, he’s not reading bullet points off a screen.  He’s talking about concepts, and supporting images or quotes will pop up behind him, but if you just watch the screen you’re missing the point.  I have a new benchmark to aim for in my presentations.

People love Perfmon. I gave a session on performance tuning, ran right up against my time limit, and people wanted more.  There’s a strong desire to learn more about what specific Perfmon counters mean, and what actions you should take when those counters are high.

Profiler groupings & aggregates can be enabled on the fly. If you get the chance to see Red Gate’s Brad McGehee speak on Profiler, attend, because everybody can learn something.  I eat, breathe and sleep Profiler, and I still didn’t know that you could enable groupings while a profile was running.  He got a lot of oohs and aahs when he showed deadlock graphs too.

Telligent is building cool stuff with social networking inside companies. I use a lot of social networking tools like Twitter to communicate quickly with other SQL Server professionals, and it helps me get my job done faster and have more fun doing it.  Rob Howard of Telligent gave a great keynote on social networking in the enterprise, and everybody was nodding their heads.  The products just made sense.  I’m sure they’re hard to sell to older executives who don’t get the power of things like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn yet, but integrated social portals like Telligent’s will help the younger generation get their job done better.

I’m still not seeing an interest in SQL 2008. The vast majority of DBAs I talked to just weren’t interested in putting in the time and effort to do upgrades because the business didn’t see an ROI in it.  They like some of the new features, but they can’t justify the manpower cost.  They also liked a lot of the Enterprise-only features in 2008, and they weren’t sure that management would spring for Enterprise.  Interesting.

Jeremy Marx and David Walker are really nice guys. One of the side effects of using Twitter is that you end up with friends all over the globe who you’ve never actually seen before. I finally got the chance to shake hands with Jeremy & David and talk with ’em for a while, and they’re both great people.  I’ve met more cool people through Twitter in the last few months than I’ve probably met in real life the last 5 years!

I’ll be back next year. I had a great time, and I’m only scratching the surface of everything that happened.  If you’re anywhere near Tulsa, I highly recommend attending Tulsa Tech Fest.  At $2 or 2 cans of food, it’s the best IT conference bargain around.

#TulsaTechFest @msftguy keynote on Live platform – blog to follow

Brian is a great presenter, but my problem with the entire Live platform can be summed up in this one slide.

This slide shows all the different Live services, including Virtual Earth, Search, Hotmail, MSN, SkyDrive, etc. It’s hard to see with my iPhone camera’s emailed photo.

These sites don’t look or feel anything like each other.

Contrast this with Google, where every single product they have looks and feels like it’s part of the same family. It really feels like a platform. Microsoft’s Live stuff is a whole ton of services that are elbowed into the same phone booth using the same name. That doesn’t make it a platform, and it sure isn’t a compelling sales pitch.

Update 9:18 AM – argh.  He’s pushing Windows Live ID, and I have a big problem with corporate ownership of identity.  If Microsoft owns my login ID and controls it across the sites.  Sure, right now it’s free to use for sites up to 1 million logins per month, but that can change at any time, and monopoly on ID is a problem.  I’m not saying Google’s login ownership is any better, but OpenID is better.  Way better.

Update 9:26 AM – ARGH. Now he’s pimping Live’s ability to share your friends with other sites.  Why restrict that to the closed Live system?  Why not pimp the XFN or FOAF open standards?  Dang it!  Where are my open source evangelists?  I love Microsoft – I make a great living off their kick-butt products – but identity ownership gives me the creeps.

Update 9:38 AM – he’s selling the ability to embed Live Messenger in your web site, so visitors can log in to do their instant messaging on your web site.  Uh, what?  Why?  Why would I want to give up screen space on my web site to let users do instant messengers?  He’s showing this “invite a friend” feature and saying it was really easy, but it wasn’t – it involved a multi-step login-and-wait procedure.  Bad user experience, too much screen real estate, and not compelling.  He does a great job of delivering the message, but it’s just a bad message.

Update 9:57 AM – he pitches Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live, and I’m actually interested in that because I want to do some video streaming.  I go to sign up for a free account, and – uh oh….

Earlier, I blogged about the upcoming Kilimanjaro and Gemini releases from Microsoft: self-service BI tools that are delivered inside Excel.  David Stein left a comment which prompted me to write this separate blog entry about self-service BI in general.  Basically, David’s comment was that the quality of data won’t be as good because the end users don’t really know what they’re doing with the data.

He’s right, but it’s the lesser of two evils, and it’s a choice that the organization has to make, and every case is different.

Think back to those movies and TV shows of full service gas stations back in the 1950’s-60’s.  I remember seeing snappily-dressed ladies pulling up to full service pumps where the attendant hustled out, started pumping the gas, and proceeded to pop the hood to check the car’s oil and the tire pressures while the tank filled up.  If it needed oil, he’d grab a few quarts, take care of the engine, and the driver sat comfortably in the car the whole time.

Today, when I pull up to the gas station, I fill the car up, but I gotta be honest: I don’t check the oil level and tire pressure every time.  It’s probably okay, but it might not be, and if it’s not, the only person I’m hurting is myself.

I could go to a full service pump, pay more, and get that taken care of.  I could drive happily knowing that everything in my car was operating at its perfect levels, and that I was avoiding disaster.  But I don’t – I save a few bucks and go to self-service.  Judging by the vanishing number of full-service pumps, I’m not alone.

Plus, it’s not always my car: when I’m rushing to return a rental car before I jet off somewhere else in my glamorous (cough) life as a traveling SQL Server expert, I don’t give a rip whether there’s any oil or if my tires are underinflated.  I wanna throw gas in there and get out as fast as I can to make my flight.

BI faces a similar pressure.  With the advent of self-service BI, our end users will have a choice: do they want perfectly maintained data with no chance of disaster?  Or are they willing to save a few bucks, vet their own data (or not vet it at all) and pump their own reports?  If they choose self-service, they won’t have to sit around waiting for the attendee to come by.

Heck, they can build their own BI reports anytime, anywhere, much like I enjoy driving up to an unmanned pump and filling up my rental car without speaking to a single human being.  (Sorry if that sounds antisocial, but the folks at service stations aren’t always the best conversationalists.)  Sometimes, people just want the best data they can get in the least amount of time so that they can race off to make the next business decision.  Not everything can wait for an ETL process design meeting.

Oh, and by the way, there aren’t a lot of jobs available as full-service gas station attendees….

At the BI Conference in Seattle, Microsoft unveiled some components of project code name Kilimanjaro, a sort of R2 release for SQL Server expected in the first half of 2010.  Here’s a couple of relevant news sources:

• Doug Henschen on Intelligent Enterprise – “Microsoft Will Bow In-Memory Analysis, Appliance-Ready Database in 2010”
• Short Kilimanjaro posts on SQLBlog.com from Marco Russo and from Mosha Pasumansky
• Project Gemini notes from the SQL Server Customer Advisory Team (SQLCAT)
• Information Week story on Kilimanjaro

Here’s the part I really like: Gemini centers around Excel as its user interface.

Let’s face it: our power users live, eat and breathe Excel.  They’re all over it.  They know it forwards and backwards, and they pull tricks with pivot tables that make DBAs scratch their heads.  My bosses have always been able to out-Excel me, and that’s been fine with me.

If Excel is going to be the future interface for self-service BI, with SQL Server as the back end, I for one welcome our new spreadsheet overlords.

Why am I embracing Excel so much?  Because the cloud is coming, open source is coming, and our competitors just keep coming.  The one thing none of them do well is the front end, the power user interface.  None of them have anything even remotely close to a user interface as rich and powerful as Excel.

If my BI team comes in and says, “Give me one good reason we shouldn’t switch our data warehouse over from SQL Server to Oracle/cloud-based MySQL/cheap Postgres/fast-database-du-jour,” I’ve got a new cool answer: our power users love self-service BI with Excel, and nobody else is going to be able to touch that.

Are there beautiful BI front ends out there that put lipstick on Oracle, MySQL and cool new databases?  Sure – but most companies are already licensing Excel on the desktop, and their users know how to use it.  Cheaper, less training, less implementation time – it’s a win all the way around for SQL Server.

And you know what I like the most?  It lets the SQL Server Management Studio team focus on day-to-day DBA task management and stay out of the BI power user business.

Robert X. Cringely is a columnist for PBS – you know, the worldwide authority on hot information technology issues.  You might recognize some of their other experts like Norm Abrams and Big Bird.  Cringely’s just like them, only with less name recognition.

In his latest blog, Cringely explains how cloud computing is going to make databases disappear altogether. Cloud services are going to be so fast that traditional things like SQL Server and Oracle won’t matter anymore.

It’s a really interesting opinion, but you know how it is – there’s two sides to every story.  I’d like to see a larger panel of opinions.  Maybe he could get Rick Steves and Ray Suarez to do a roundtable panel.  Maybe toss in some folks from Masterpiece Theater.

(Note to self: it’s my own fault for reading Cringely’s column in the first place.  He’s like the Enquirer of IT.)