Now up is Ted Kummert of Microsoft.
He’s giving us a good overview of some of the technology coming up. He’s showing us his Top 5 reasons to be at PASS
- You are part of the world’s largest gathering of SQL Server Professionals – way too true. why aren’t you here?
- You can take your questions directly to the “Source” – Yes, this is very useful
- We’ve got Wayne & Rushabh – Instead of Arnold Schwarzenneger at the Oracle conference. Eh
- You can work hard & play hard at Gameworks – Oh lord, we’re in a DOT COM. Please no.
- You will build skills & knowledge on the #1 Database in the world – Yes.
Most of these are pretty good reasons to be here. #1 and #5 especially.
The Information Platform Vision. Ah, it’s no longer called the Data Platform Vision. That’s the kind of change that get’s DBA’s worked up. However, it’s true. The desktop, the servers (SQL Server), and the cloud (Azure). They’re still stating the SQL Server is the foundation for the information platform. IBM is now a FastTrack partner. R2 is going to scale to 256 processors. R2 is also going to go to 100’s of TB (yikes).
We’re hearing about one companies experience with upgrading to 2008. They were very interested in partitioning and data compression. Data compression not only saves space, but you’ll see performance improvements. I’ve seen the most improvement in indexes, but I’ve talked to people who are also seeing a lot of enhancements on the data performance (fewer pages in memory means more data available in memory means better performance). They went through a full production upgrade with lots of users, lots of data, lots of servers, over a weekend.
Now Mr. Kummert is going at EmpoweredIT with information about Application & Multi-Server Management. Dan Jones is coming up for a demo on multi-server management. They’re going to show a feature complete build of the multi-server management system in R2. This should be good. He’s showing how it works, right out of the gate. Setting up instances for management right in front of us. Oops. Damn I hate that. The demo is tanking a bit. But they’re plowing through. The servers validate ahead of time so that you know if it’s going to work ahead of time. The dashboardfor the control point looks good. So they’re going to enroll other instances. Kimberly Tripp talked about this last night. If you’re really interested in hearing about this, you should track her down. She’s got some good insights to the product (hardly a surpise, I realize). Setting the policies for monitoring and management are pretty easy. It’s slick and simple. Not bad. Now they’re moving into the application management.
I have to run though. Have to get ready for my session.