Follow my logic here for a moment as I walk through a couple rhetorical questions. Have you ever had a friend developed an application entirely on SQL Server Developer Edition? (Not that YOU would ever do such a thing, but maybe you know someone who has. Right?) And has your friend’s IT department actually deployed said application only to discover that they’re only licensed for Standard Edition in their production environment? And then was your friend’s IT management team is horrified to learn that they’ve either got to go through the very expensive process of extracting all of the Enterprise and/or Datacenter Edition features for the production application in order to remain in compliance, upgrade to the more expensive SKU licenses, or risk a potential future audit?
I’m not saying that this has happened to any of us. We’re too smart for that, after all. But have you ever known anyone who’s had this experience?
Having worked with a lot of customers another commercial RDBMS platforms (which I’ll euphemistically call “SEER” from Redforest City and “IB4” from Upstate City), I can tell you that auditing is a fun and exciting way for those platform vendors to make a LOT of money. This is especially true because a production application, once successfully deployed, tends to be too valuable to disable or otherwise compromise because high-end features slipped in to the development cycle even though the production environment only a “standard edition” SKU in place. Ouch! Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place. Now, keep in mind that this is a strategy used by SEER and not by Microsoft. But Microsoft could implement the same sort of licensing audits if they wanted to. (Please leave a comment here if you have ever been audited. I’d love to hear your experiences, at least as much as NDA’s allow).
So if you use SQL Server Developer Edition (DE), of any version, would you like to see a feature that enables you to run DE not in its default “full featured mode” but at another SKU level, such as good ol’ Standard Edition? I know I would.
If you’re on the same page as I am, there are a number of suggestions logged on Connect about this very feature! Make your voice heard! Check out:
Of course, the more skeptical reader might say “Hey, that’s their tough luck. Developers should know the difference in the SKU licensing options and feature sets of whatever SKU they’re developing on compared to what they’ll deploy on.” And I wouldn’t fault you for saying so.
But I would go on to point out that much of Microsoft’s success in enterprise IT settings can be traced back to their very strong relationship with developers. And anything that Microsoft can do to empower developers to save time, money, and resources during the development phase of an IT project in turn energizes that relationship between developer and Microsoft.
It also makes the life of the DBA that much easier, because they don’t need to imply that those cowboys on the development team went off half-cocked again. So what’s your opinion? Should SQL Server Developer Edition include a feature that sets the SKU-level of the database engine?
Quest Software’s latest community initiative, Windows Azure-based Project Lucy, has debuted! Project Lucy is part infrastructure analytics, part social media experiment, and part performance data warehouse.
The best things about Project Lucy include:
It’s Free – just like our SQLServerPedia website, Project Lucy is free to anyone who wants to upload a trace file
It’s 1oo% web-based – you don’t have to download or maintain anything and updates roll out seamlessly, all the time
It really helps – just generate a SQL Trace on a SQL Server 2000, 2005 or 2008 instance, upload it on www.projectlucy.com, and see for yourself
This initiative empowers DBAs and IT professionals to gain a better understanding of their database performance through automated analyses and collaboration with their peers. Our goal is to allow users to go beyond the benefits of installing and using a commercial product, and tap into an online community to share and compare experiences and results.
Our goal is to test the best ways we can help users learn and understand what their performance data really means, and how they should act upon that data – if at all – in a collaborative, meaningful way. For this debut, Project Lucy will accept SQL Trace files, or zip files containing multiple traces, and will provide a summary of the content and areas where performance can be improved. As y’all use the service, information will become available to help you compare your performance and engage in meaningful discussions with others about the issues you are facing.
Your feedback, your feedback, and participation will drive how Project Lucy evolves. Get involved by participating in the pilot program! And let me know what you think.
Kevin discusses resources online that he uses and considers to be excellent destinations for SQL Server professionals. Kevin will discuss each site he uses in detail – check it out!
Kevin Kline will offer insight into best practices for SQL Server 2005 set up, configuration and queries. He will also discuss tuning for both the server and hardware to help an application perform better after it is deployed. This presentation will offer a better understanding of several SQL Server performance related areas including:
* Hardware design
* SQL Server configuration settings
* Database configuration settings
* Application design
* SQL Tuning
Need to troubleshoot SQL Server 2005 memory settings? Not sure where to look to measure SQL 2000 memory pressure? Kevin lays out your options in today’s podcast.
You can view this video in higher quality or your favorite portable formats at:
Since the release of SQL Server 2005, companies have been investing heavily in SQL Server for their business-critical applications. DBAs are now challenged with supporting ever-growing datasets and making efficient use of allocated disk space in both production and enterprise storage environments. Yet DBAs seldom have a clear picture of their data storage and therefore cannot determine whether they are getting a worthwhile return on their storage investment or if an out-of-disk situation is looming.
In this presentation, Kevin will address these challenges and explore methodologies to help you efficiently use allocated disk space for enterprise storage and production environments.
This presentation is a bit old, but largely still applicable. It will help you understand Microsoft tuning techniques. It will teach tips and tricks for making queries perform better, and how to use tools to tune SQL.
