SQL Server has supported VLDBs (very large databases) for some time now. Back in the SQL Server 2000 days, I recall hearing multi-terabyte databases were unusual but doable. Now, they are commonplace, while databases in the hundreds of terabytes inhabit the part of the map that says “there be dragons.” While VLDBs are quite common on SQL Server today, highly scalable systems that can be flexibly extended in the same fashion as Oracle/RAC are less so. So, how do you design a highly available architecture for SQL Server if it’s not like Oracle/RAC. [READ MORE]
Archive for the ‘Opinion’ Category
DBTA:Reaching for Highly Scalable Systems with SQL Server 2008
Monday, August 30th, 2010DBTA: Long-Term Changes Resulting from Policy-Based Management
Monday, August 23rd, 2010It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago that my company’s IT department was bracing for a major new line of work. Back in the mid 1990s, we were going full steam into client-server technology. At the same time, we were significantly expanding our workforce. The IT department that had spent years as an old-style mainframe shop, was suddenly inundated with requests for new workstations, network user IDs, new network domains, permission requests, and requests for application access privileges. Our lone mainframe permissions person quickly felt overwhelmed and a little baffled by all of these new privileges and provisioning needs. Within a year or two of our first client-server application, we went from one to three staffers working full-time granting access to the various applications and network resources within our environment. [READ MORE]
DBTA: The New Master’s Certification from Microsoft
Monday, August 16th, 2010In July, Microsoft announced its new advanced training and certification program known as the Master’s Certification. (Read more about it at http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/master/default.mspx). I’m really excited about this new certification because it fully lives up to the standard of “the appropriate certification for the appropriate audience.” For one thing, if you’ve ever gone to a martial arts school, you may find many talented martial artists and even several black belts there, but you’ll rarely find more than one “master.” Expect this new SQL Server certification to be equally rare and, hence, very meaningful regarding the certificate holders’ capabilities. [READ MORE]
Google Wave is Dead. Long Live the Wave!
Monday, August 9th, 2010
I Never Could Hang 10 (Minutes) on Google Wave
While enduring an endless series of flight delays and disgruntled passengers in the Baltimore airport that was my own personal travel hell on the evening of Thursday, August 5th, I came across this interesting and important article:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/google-kills-wave-its-collaboration-tool/?ref=technology
Even if you don’t read the article, you can see from the URL that Google has decided to put an end to the collaboration experiment known as Wave. Wave will be available through the end of the year and most of its major components are now available as open source, should any devotees choose to continue developing the code base. However, Wave didn’t reach the critical mass that Google was looking for and, without that critical mass of users, it wasn’t seeing a lot of innovation or updates to the features or UI. I view Google’s reach of 1M users as a “failure” with a bit of grin. How many other vendors out there would consider 1M users too few? Otoh, if they wanted really wide adoption, why in the world did they require a private invitation? Superior products are frequently hampered by inferior marketing and market delivery, this being a really good example.
Slide to the Rescue?
More Fun than Google Slide?
I also feel the need to point out that I have a lot of respect for Google giving the old heave-ho to a product that needs to go. Many companies cling to a great idea, funneling huge amounts of resources into what everyone else can see as a black hole. Failure, under vibrant and forward thinking leadership, is only success delayed. Read Google’s take on the situation here. Certainly, this means we’ll see Google pushing their new social media acquisition, Slide, much more as well.
And, since many of the technological bits of Wave will live on, I’m sure we’ll see Slide advance in interesting ways.
Frankly, I found the general idea of Wave to be fascinating and powerful. But after spending quite a bit of time, like at least 20 minutes, tinkering around with it, I still had no idea how to do anything with it. I was so motivated to use it that I almost watched one of the videos that they’d posted to train you. But honestly, am I just ridiculously jaded or has the overall market for cloud-based apps moved the bar for ease-of-use that anything that takes more than 15 minutes to figure out is drama? I hate to say it, but I think the answer is a resounding “YES”. By extension, I think that this is the main reason that email still trumps all other methods of collaboration. (Yes, that includes Microsoft SharePoint too for all you fanboys.) That is, email does not disrupt any existing workflows, it has a clean UI, it doesn’t make you learn new ways of working, and it’s so widespread that you’re not hampered by a product that has a very limited user base.
Great Idea Leads To Great Product Success, Right?
The Graveyard of Ideas
I also feel that Google Wave is a good example of a technological solution looking for a problem, as well as a product looking for a marketing message. When launching a product, it’s crucial to have a crystal clear message to a well-defined audience. Any ambiguity in the message or muddling of the audience can spell doom. And, IMO, Google clearly missed the boat on both counts. Many of their demos were all about sharing photos. Uh, ever heard of Facebook, n’est pas? Then again, many later PR was about collaboration. Then how come we didn’t get smokin’ hot project management demos? A book that I recommend called The Innovator’s Prescription (website is here) says it very well:
“The graveyard of failed products and services is populated by things that people *should* have wanted–if only they could have been convinced those things were good for them. The home-run products in the marketing hall of fame, in contrast, are concepts that helped people more affordably, effortlessly, swiftly, and effectively do what they already had been trying to get done.” (Christensen, The Innovator’s Prescription, p. 16)
I really like Christensen’s point. So many people who build products focus on the “should” of a product, as in “this should make a lot of people happy”, over and above providing an effortless aid to people’s daily tasks. This leads me to a topic for another day, user-interface design. But enough writing for now. It’s bed time.
So what are your thoughts? Do you think other factors contributed to Wave’s decline?
Thanks!
-Kevin
Twitter @kekline
Live! TechNet Radio: Microsoft Cloud Services – SQL Azure
Friday, June 18th, 2010
Jack Handy, famous from Saturday Night Live
Just wanted to let you know that a TechNet Radio episode and interview I did about cloud computing is now live on TechNet Edge. It was the featured spot on Thursday, June 3rd and is also featured on the TechNet homepage.
I’ve been trying to wear more of an analyst’s hat these days, so this webcast has a lot of my “deep thinking” on issues related to cloud computing – hopefully at a higher level of quality that Jack Handy.
A salient point that I think many analysts are overlooking is the changing nature of data as it exists in the cloud. For decades, data has primarily been about people (and their activities) for consumption by other people. The cloud is enabling a major shift in data generation and consumption where data is produced by machines for consumption by other machines. We’ll soon be looking at situations, now rather rare, in which sensors are extremely commonplace. These sensors, whether they be in traffic signals or high-end medical devices, will create enormous amounts of data far more frequently than ever before, loading that data directly into cloud databases. The cloud databases will consume and process the data and, when automated analysis (made all the easier through features like StreamInsight in SQL Server 2008 R2) will flag important findings for review by a real-live human being. Check out the interview for several real-world examples being played out even as we speak.
Here is a direct link:
Or if brevity is your thing and you prefer a surrogate key over a natural key:
Perhaps I can persuade you to blog, tweet, or place a link to it in your Facebook or team newsletter? Maybe with a few deep thoughts? Please? Pretty please?
And I welcome your deep thoughts and responses here.
Enjoy,
-Kev
MacGyver Moments
Monday, March 29th, 2010The MacGyver meme is making the rounds and I was kindly tagged by my buddy, Thomas LaRock ( blog | twitter) – that most famous SQLRockstar, who wisely chose to tag me early in the process, lest he receive another round of disciplining like the last time. I’ve also seen several other good MacGyver Moments from Aaron Bertrand (blog), David Stein also known as Made2Mentor ( blog | twitter ), and Denny Cherry also known as MrDenny (blog). I’m looking forward to reading the bloggers that they tagged to see what others in our community have cooked up. In case you haven’t heard, your MacGyver Moments are those times when you improvised an excellent solution to a problem using non-traditional materials, techniques, or tools – like the time I repaired my flux capacitor using bailing wire, chewing gum, the tears of Glenn Beck, and the sweat of a master ninja.
I'm a bit more like MacGruber than MacGyver
Necessity is the Mutha of Invention
Believe it or not, I’ve got a long history of doing things MacGyver style. To begin with, I grew up without two nickels to rub together. That means you have to improvise – a lot. Once I hit teenage years, I was constantly tinkering with all things mechanical and electrical trying to stretch their useful lifespan beyond any conception of “reasonable use”, much like my teenage dating experiences. For example, I once cobbled together garage workshop fan from the leftover parts of an electric pencil sharpener, a frame made of bailing wire (yes, bailing wire), solder, and handmade cardboard fan blades. Shamefully, it did not include any duct tape. But it worked great! I had to do that stuff all the time out of necessity, such as with my series of malfunctioning cars and dodgy electronics. Hey, my MacGyver experiences also taught me that admitting to owning a “Plymouth Horizon” is, when trying to impress the ladies, about the same as sporting a 4″ gravy stain on your “Howling Wolf” t-shirt.
Aaaah, the Plymouth – a vehicle truly designed somewhere between the third and fifth ring of Hades. I can’t even count the number of jury-rigged fixes I put into that thing. One that stands out clearly, because my friends used this to prank me on several occasions, was the repair to the broken door handle on the driver’s side. Since I couldn’t afford replacement parts, I used bailing wire (I could always count on you, my old friend) fixed to the inner locking mechanism and a key ring as a handle dangling invisibly from the bottom door sill. About a year after that (around 1986 or so), I discovered junk yards and was able to rip a barely used mechanism from a Dodge of the same body style for $3. I became pretty well known at those junk yards – I blame Chrysler. Quality was not job 1 in those days.
Creativity and Innovation can be like that. No buck teeth in my case.
Geek Creativity
Like my friend Brent Ozar, I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) growing up. I was always the “DM”, that is, the guy who administrated the game, while all my friends played characters on the adventure. But D&D, like many good products, was designed to suck the dollars right out of your product by producing an endless stream of new adventures to play and supplements to purchase. I, on the other hand, wasn’t gonna spend a dime of my money on that. So I created my own adventures (called modules). As I got better, I constructed campaigns (i.e a related sets of modules) and from that, a related set of campaigns into an entire Tolkien-like world (this is called a mileau) which I called Aquilonia. My buddies loved it and, realizing that bragging about geekness creates an inverse coolness effect, can brag that I won some contests at regional conventions for game design.
Code Creativity
Back in the day, I remember wondering if I should stop doing things differently than my buddies and peers. For example, we were assigned to write a program that would find the day of the week based on passing in any pre-Y2K date in one of my COBOL college courses. (No mocking please – COBOL was big back then). Everyone in the class, and I mean everyone, wrote very large programs that delivered the day of the week through very large (and, imo, cumbersome) IF-THEN-ELSE structures. My program had two elegant WHILE loops and thirty-eight lines of code based on the premise that our calendar repeats every 14 years and that all months contain at least 28 days and at most 31 days. I got an A+.
SQL Server Improvisation
Back when my IT shop had bragging privileges as one of the largest enterprise installations of Microsoft SQL Server (in the v6.0 and v6.5 days), we were faced with implementing some sort of way to do bi-directional replication. The product did a good job of standard transactional replication, but bi-directional replication was only possible through a major rewrite of the application. Instead, we cooked up a way to make it work – SQL Server would allow us do outward transactional replication as the transactions occurred. We were able to bring the data back by also enabling sync replication (which is non-transactional) every evening. Thus, we got bi-directional data flows without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on third-party tools. (I must also give kudos to the team I worked with and who made this solution work, particularly Dwayne Seiber, who is still lead DBA there.)
Summary
Creativity, innovation, and improvisation are what you make of them. You must make the choice to pursue them. Yes, necessity often forces to seek out MacGyver moments. So does laziness in some cases. How many master developers do you know who’ll work very hard to fully conceptualize their program before starting to write it, saving time in the long run. Now that’s creative laziness! But MacGyver moments also stretch our abilities and call us to higher achievements.
