Allen White

Tech Ed 2007 - Tuesday Highlights

LINQ is a new framework built into Visual Studio 2008 for standardizing data access in the development environment. I attended a session on Tuesday showing how straightforward it was. I'd been apprehensive about it for some time because, hey, I'm a database guy, ya know. I'm very impressed, and if it makes building better apps easier I'm all for it.

The Kimberly Tripp demo fest was fun, but I'd seen most of the demos in the pre-conference sessions on Sunday. The discussion of mirroring a database from a clustered server to a non-clustered mirror was good, though, because there's one problem that can be easily overlooked. If the primary server in the cluster fails, the cluster group moves to the secondary physical server, which has to go through standard SQL Server startup procedures. This can take 60-90 seconds easily, perhaps more. Meanwhile, the mirror and the witness servers don't see the primary (because it's busy failing over in the cluster). They make quorum and bring the mirror up as the principal database in the mirror, because their threshold is maybe 10 seconds. Now, the clustered server is back up on its secondary hardware and tries to come back up as the principal, but can't. The original mirror is now the principal database for the mirror set, and the database in the cluster is now the mirror. This may not be what you want to have happen.

I also attended a session (actually a chalk-talk) on the new Change Data Capture feature in SQL Server 2008. This is very cool stuff, and I was expecting it to be used primarily for auditing changes to critical data, but the team presenting the subject discussed how to use that change data to easily (and quickly) keep data warehouse data up to date, because only the changes to the source data are in the captured data. Very cool.

My last session (another chalk-talk) was with Paul Randle and Kimberly Tripp, in a Q&A session on VLDB maintenance. I'm still trying to get a handle on managing a few databases I have, one in particular that's over 130GB.

The evening was spent discovering a wonderful brewery (Orlando Brewing) in a warehouse area of Orlando, followed by dinner at a barbeque joint. Fun.

Allen