Rick Heiges

Well I just got out of the Thrusday Keynote.  Veritas started the Keynote session highlighting the “Blamestorm” scenario that run rampant in IT.  The staff responsible for one component blame another component; that staff blames yet another, and on and on.  It was entertaining to put it the context of a take-off on the Sopranos, but I have never seen the show.  Still, I appreciate the effort.  Veritas as you would imagine focused a lot on the IO challenges.

Dave Campbell highlighted the second portion of the keynote with some neat demos.  My favorite demo was the one that showed off “Query Notifications”.  Basically, once a query is run, the database will have a specific result set known.  If a change occurs in the database that would affect this known result set, the query is notified that it shold be run again.  This will save processing time on the server.  I probably didn't explain this very well, but I thought it was neat.

I am currently sitting in a session on Transactional Replication.  Cool stuff!

After 2 breakout sessions so far plus a very good lunch in the exhibit hall, my brain is already starting to feel “full”.

The exhibit hall area is very lively with some neat games like PLINKO and wheel of fortune.  Already got one t-shirt and a pen plus several other little trinkets.  I love SWAG!

In the High Availability Session today by Mark Souza, Database Mirroring was the focus of the portion I attended before I was pulled away by another meeting.  The neat thing I learned here was that the other system databases like msdb could by mirrored - but  still not the master database.

Bill Baker delivered the keynote address this morning at PASS.  The BI Tools were highlighted during his speech as many improvements are coming in SQL Server 2005. 

There were 2 Demos.  One featured a new Report Generation Tools that will be available in SQL Server 2005 that is more “User Friendly” than the Reporting Services project in .NET today.  When you create a basic aggregate type of report, the system will also automatically create drill-down reports that you can click on inside the report you write.  It will most likely be available in Beta 3.

The second Demo was on Integration Services (formerly known as DTS).  The demo featured a new “wizard” to help you define slowly changing dimensions.  It took about 5 minutes to create it with the wizard!  Cool!

I am currently sitting in a session called “Operational OLAP”.  It has some neat discussion on if a data warehouse structure is needed.

I hope to blog more later today!

PASS kicked off today with 5 pre-con sessions.  I attended Trey Johnson's session on BI.  Since I do not play in this space as much, I picked up quite a few tips. 

The welcome reception went on in the main atrium of the Gaylord Palms where the main highlight was a “Quiz Show” like game.  The acoustics in there weren't very good, but everyone seemed to enjoy the game.

The good folks from SQL Server Central had a reception following the general welcome reception for anyone who registered with their promotion code.  It was a lot of fun too.  They had several XBOX consoles to give away.  In order to win one, they had a game where you had to find another person at the reception with the same number as you had on your star sticker when you came in.  It reminded me a lot of a stock trading floor scene.

It looks like it will be a good week!

Next week, I'll bet at PASS in Orlando.  I plan to blog daily (or perhaps more - hopefully). 

There is a welcome reception on Tuesday evening.  I will be there.  Look me up.  Also, I will be speaking first thing on Wednesday AM at the New Member Breakfast Session at 7am.  If you are attending PASS for the firt time, please attend this breakfast session.  It will highlight the benefits of membership in introduce you to the candidates for the Board of Directors as well as a preview of some of the events not to miss for the balance of the week. 

Disney property is directly on the other side of I-4 at the Gaylord Palms.  If your family comes with you, they will have easy access to WDW.

Monday and Tuesday are Pre-conference seminars which will focus mainly on SQL Server 2005 readiness.  I really can't wait fo the week to begin!  It is VERY tiring, but the information you get and the contacts you make will stay with you for a long time.

I've been learning a lot lately about SQL Server Express 2005.  There is still one advantage that MSDE will have over SSE that has almost nothing to do with its feature set.  It is that MSDE will still run on the 9x platform.  I know that many folks say that is not important.  How many small companies or organizations are still running 98 on some PC in the corner?  How many charities or not-for-profits have the latest equipment? 

I am a proponent of enticing these groups to get up to date with newer equipment, but many of these places are struggling and think that a Pentium 300 is a fast PC.  When developing with MSDE or SSE, consider the audience and what is the “worth” of your application.  Is it worth the trouble of these organizations to beef up their older equipment to a respectable PC? 

There are many nice things about SSE.  Don't get me wrong, but make sure that the client is able to run the app on the equipment they have.

Another $.02 in the pot.....

In a recent local user group meeting about SQL Server 2005 DB Mirroring, a question was asked if database charges are also sent to the mirror such as a column being added.  I posted this question in the newsgroups and received a response indicating that it did indeed make the change to the mirrored database as well.

Enjoy!

I conducted a meting last night on the topic of DB Mirroring.  The basics were explored as well as when / how to use it.  After the meeting, I got some feedback about the features.  Everyone seemed to be really excited about Mirroring and the Snapshots for Reporting purposes.  The item they didn't like was the not being able to more than one system.  Currently, a DB Mirroring session may be setup for either High Availability or for Disaster Recovery.  Each has some different settings.  The IDEAL would be to have two mirrors - one that could serve in the HA role and another serving in the DR role.  There are other teachnologies/features that can help out with the DR role like replication and log shipping, but DB MIrroring is really all about uptime and is a much cheaper alternative to Clustering for most cases.

We had some good questions too.  After I research the answers, I'll report back in another blog.

I had a slight problem with my laptop and off it went for repairs.  Luckily, I had backed up the info before I sent it out.  I won't get into the details, but the teachies who serviced it decided that Windows ME (the original OS on the laptop - 3 years ago) would be better to use to fix the problem.  I was furious when I got it back because the problem had NOTHING to do with the HD, but I decided it would be a good time to rebuild the system.  I loaded XP and also got the SP2 that is so big installed and running.  I think I like it better!

It took me days to get everything I need back on and to recover my data from my backup.  I re-installed SQL Server 2005 Beta2.  I was a little nervous, but it worked like a charm.  I can now continue my work with SQL Server Beta 2.

I know I read it before, but it is always good to see it work well for yourslf first hand that SP2 didn't break anything of mine.