At the keynote in this year’s PASS 2011 conference Ted Kummert announced that SQL Server 2012 will include a new immersive data visualization technology named Power View. Formerly code named project Crescent, Power View is a data exploration and visualization tool that enables ad-hoc queries from a variety of devices including new touch-based devices like Windows 8 will support. At the PASS keynote technical Fellow Amir Netz demonstrated working with Power View on both a Windows Phone 7 and an iPad. Power View will replace the older Report Builder 1.0 ad-hoc query that was first introduced in SQL Server 2005. The Power View technology is included in SQL Server Denali CTP3....
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As a part of their any data, any size, anywhere initiative, at this year’s PASS 2011 conference in Seattle Ted Kummert, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Business Platform Division announced Microsoft’s intension to deliver Hadoop based data management to Windows Server and Windows Azure. Hadoop is a distributed computing platform that is written in Java. It uses a MapReduce technology to distribute computing resources across clusters of computers to rapidly process extremely high volumes of data. At first Microsoft’s embracing of Hadoop may seem a bit confusing but when you view like their incorporation of OLAP services back in SQL Server 7 you can see that support for Hadoop is really another step along the evolutionary path of SQL Server becoming a complete enterprise data platform. Hadoop will enable the processing of high volumes of data as well as unstructured data. A CTP is planned to be released before the end of the year. The Hadoop implementation will be integrated with both SQL Server relational databases as well as Analysis services. Microsoft announced Hadoop Connectors for SQL Server and the Parallel Data Warehouse. Customers can use these connectors for bi-directional integration of Hadoop with SQL Server’s relational and BI data. Hadoop data will be able to be consumed using Microsoft’s BI tools, including Microsoft PowerPivot and Power View...
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One of the things that became clear after the preview of the next version of Windows Server (code named Windows Server 8) and the direction that Microsoft announced at its recent BUILD 2011 conference is the fact that Microsoft is seriously moving toward using PowerShell as its preferred management tool. While the GUI isn’t going away Microsoft has added almost 2000 PowerShell cmdlets to Windows Server 8 – radically expanding the areas that can be managed with PowerShell. While not everyone knows it SQL Server can already be managed using PowerShell. SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 both provide PowerShell cmdlets that let you navigate the database, create database objects, and run queries. You can start SQL Server’s PowerShell cmdlet by entering sqlps on the command prompt or by opening SSMS and right clicking on an object. While most DBAs don’t use PowerShell yet now would be great time to get started learning it. There is a learning curve for PowerShell but once you get the hang of it it’s reasonably straightforward. There’s no doubt that PowerShell will be an important management tool going forward and it’s more capable than you might think. For a more complete introduction to using PowerShell with SQL Server you might want to check out:: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc281954.aspx In addition, you might want to read Accessing SQL Server Data from PowerShell by Robert Sheldon at InstantDoc ID# 100458....
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At this past BUILD Conference in Anaheim CA Microsoft released the details of the next release of the Windows Server operating system currently known as Windows Server 8. Here are some of of the highlights in the new Windows Server 8 operating system. New multi-server capable Server Manager Server Core will be the default installation The GUI is now considered a feature which enables you to perform your initial server configuration using the GUI then remove it when you’re readily to move into production. Storage pools enable you to group together individual disks Thin provisioning and storage deduplication are provided out of the box New support for continuously available file shares with SMB 2.2 Clusters support 63 nodes and 4000 VMs Support for installing SQL Server databases on file shares Hyper-V 3.0 in Windows Server 8 will support hosts with up to 160 logical CPUs and up to 2 TB RAM. Hyper-V 3.0 VMs will support up to 32 virtual CPUs with up to 512 GB RAM per VM providing much greater scalability for your SQL Server virtual machines. Live Migration in Hyper-V 3.0 supports multiple concurrent Live Migrations Live Migration without the requirement for shared storage between the different virtualization hosts Live Storage Migration enables you to move a virtual machine’s configuration, virtual hard disk and snapshot files to a new location without incurring any downtime for the VM. Network virtualization enables multiple virtual networks on the same networking hardware Hyper-V Replica will provide support for built-in asynchronous replication of Hyper-V VMs Built-in NIC Teaming works across multiple heterogonous vendor NICs ...
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At this past VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas VMware announced their new vFabric Data Director. vFabric Data Director is a platform that’s intended to allow enterprise databases to function as a cloud service. In his VMworld 2011 keynote Paul Martiz, CEO of VMware, referred to this as Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS). vFabric Data Director is designed to allow administrators to securely automate and delegate routine administrative tasks making the database more self-service. These tasks include database provisioning, backup, and cloning. Currently the vFabric Data Director only supports a customized version of PostgresSQL that VMware created called VMware vFabric Postgres. However, VMware has published their standard for the service. At this point neither SQL Server or Oracle support the new vFabric Data Director service. You can find out more about vFabric Data Director at: http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vfabric-data-director/...
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The new SQL Server Developer Tools (previously codenamed Juneau) is designed to close the gap between relational database development and BI development. From my point of view the new Developer Tools is overdue. It never did make sense to me why I needed to do T-SQL development using SSMS but when I wanted to use Reporting Services or Integration Services I needed to use BIDS – this was especially annoying because you knew that both SSMS and BIDS were both built on top of the Visual Studio shell. A recent project that I’ve been working on really pointed out this problem. While working on an ASP.NET application I needed to have Visual Studio 2010 open for working on the web application, SSMS open for developing the T-SQL stored procedures and database schema, and BIDS open for developing the Reporting Services reports used by the application. Then I spent a good deal of time tabbing between the different environments. You might point out that I could have done my T-SQL development in Visual Studio but I’ve never liked Visual Studio for T-SQL development. There are little problems like the data types not being displayed in the explorer dialog but the main issue is a lack of visibility into the SQL Server instance. Denali’s new SQL Server Development Tools is supposed to solve a good chuck of these problems by combing the relational and T-SQL development capabilities from SSMS with the BI development features in BIDS. Don’t worry both SSMS and BIDS are still present in Denali – at least as far as CTP3 goes. However, BIDS may be dropped from the final release. My experiences with SQL Server Developer Tools were a bit disappointing. The SQL Server Developer Tools are not part of the CTP3 package itself. Instead, you have to download and install them using the slow and failure prone Web Platform Installer. The Web Platform Installer, which failed three times during the excruciatingly slow download and installation process, is a great example of how ch...
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With all of the recent push to the cloud by various vendors it’s easy to forget that there are really two ways of implementing cloud computing. For sure, the big cloud vendors push is for businesses to move to public cloud computing. However, many organizations have leaned more toward the private cloud. The public cloud and the private cloud offer similar promises: reduced operation expenses, greater elasticity of resources, and self-service management. The big difference is that using the public cloud requires leasing resources from some other vendor’s web-based infrastructure. In contrast, you implement the private cloud as a management layer on top of your own internal infrastructure. Not surprisingly, most IT professionals are far fonder of the idea of the private cloud than they are the public cloud because the private cloud leverages your existing infrastructure and its keeps vital aspects of your infrastructure like performance, availability and security under the control of your own company. But if you think about it does the private cloud really work for SQL Server? SQL Server is not like IIS where workloads can be balanced between multiple servers. In other words, you can’t add an additional SQL Server instances to your cluster and get any performance benefits. For SQL Server, clusters only offer enhanced availability – not enhanced performance. SQL Server users are connected to a given database and that database has a given configuration and properties. While that may be the case that doesn’t mean that you can dynamically alter the available computing power for a SQL Server instance. Virtualization is the key to implementing SQL Server in the private cloud. SQL Server instances running in VMs can be dynamically live migrated to hosts with greater resource availability and computing power. Further, if the SQL Server instance is running in a VM and the host has the available physical capacity you can dynamically increase the number of virtual CPUs and RAM ...
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This past week I was vividly and personally reminded about what I think is probably the single biggest problem to cloud computing: the last mile. Cloud providers do provide service level agreements (SLAs) for different levels of promised availability but that really doesn’t help anything when the problem happens in that last mile of wire between your network provider and your local location. In my case, I was just out of service for over two days because a service truck took out the telephone wires right outside my office. Thanks to the fates and some unusually skillful driving (or whatever) my office was the only building affected– lucky me. Both the phone and my Internet connections were gone and it was a bit enlightening about exactly how much I tend to use those two things. It took Qwest two days and two repair calls to get the everything working again. All in all, looking at the pig picture it was really more of an annoyance than a disaster. All my main servers are located on-premise and my product testing and other office work continued on without too much trouble. Email and web-browsing were out. However, with so many vendors focusing on the cloud these days I couldn’t help but think about what would have happened if the critical services I was using were cloud based. For this kind of local outage the cloud provider could not have held been responsible. While their services are dependent on that last mile of networking they are also independent of your Internet service provider. In this case, the outage would have been the responsibility of the customer. So there would have been no refunds for the cloud provider not meeting their SLA. An SLA in itself is no guarantee of availability. Certainly there are ways to help mitigate the last mile problem. For instance, you can arrange for high priority services level from your Internet provider and you could arrange for duplex Internet service providers. Both of these measures would help but eve...
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There’s no doubt that availability is one of the most important if not the most important job for the database administrator. However, choosing the right options isn’t always easy because there’s a lot of different options and each is designed for a different purpose. Here's an quick overview of SQL Server’s different high availability options: Windows Failover Clustering – Microsoft's premier high availability solution, Windows Failover Clustering provides sever level protection. Before Windows Server 2008 clustering was very difficult to setup. With Windows Server 2008 and higher this task is much easier but there are still many working parts. Clustering provides automatic failover and can be implemented with up to 16 nodes (each node is a separate server system). There is some downtime as services are shifted to the backup node. Clustering requires Windows Server Enterprise edition and higher. Database Mirroring – Unlike clustering database mirroring provides protection at the database level. Database mirroring automatically forwards transaction log entries from a principle system to a mirror system. Database mirroring is limited to two systems: the principle and the mirror. There are two modes of database mirroring: high safety and high performance. High Safety mode is only available in the SQL Server Enterprise edition and provides automatic failover but it also requires a third SQL Server system to act as a witness. One catch with database mirroring is that you need to be sure that server level objects such as logins are the same between both systems. Mirroring doesn’t handle this for you. Log Shipping – Log shipping is really more of a disaster recover technology. With log shipping transaction logs are periodically send from the primary system to one or more secondary systems. Unlike mirroring which forwards transaction log entries as they occur log shipping forward entries periodically whenever the SQL Agent job runs the log shipping stored procedure. Log...
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Visual Studio LightSwitch is Microsoft’s new entry level development environment. It has been in development for almost two years. LightSwitch has the potential to fill in the low end development void that was left with the retirement of VB6. Microsoft is releasing the final version of Visual Studio LightSwitch on July 26th 2011. You can find out more about Visual Studio LightSwitch at: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/lightswitch...
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