After today’s keynote, I spent some time as an ambassador for PASS. Being an ambassador means that you stand in the hallway wearing a red vest before and after sessions. You help direct people to their sessions, answer questions about various sessions, and smile to help people feel more comfortable in a completely overwhelming environment. Helping out was very very rewarding. I had a blast being a PASS ambassador, and I’m looking foward to being an ambassador on Friday morning at breakfast.
Interpreting Perfmon and Profiler Results with Cloud-Based BI
Brent Ozar was asked to present at the last minute, but that didn’t detract from the presentation. After this morning’s keynote talking about the cloud opportunities, I knew that I would definitely need to get my brain around how to use the cloud effectively in my job so that I could advise business users on what they can do with the cloud.
Brent gave a great overview of how to use the Microsoft cloud services in Excel to analyze and slice & dice perfmon and profiler information to get a solid understanding of what’s actually going on inside the database. One of the biggest points he stressed was how you need to be intelligent in how you slice and dice and use the analysis tools available because if you work with garbage and apply meaningless analysis, you’ll only be making decisions based on garbage.
Brent blogs about the cloud and SQL Server at brentozar.com.
Additional resources are available at:
- SQL Server Pedia
- CloudEnterprise.info This also includes cloud outage information
- SQL Server Data Mining This is where you can get the excel add-ins for the cloud.
Database Unit Test Why-How-Now
Jamie Laflen – team lead from Microsoft for this product – presented on how unit testing is integrated in Visual Studio Team System or Team Dev edition. I took a lot of notes in this session about the nitty gritty details, but it boils down to this: VS now has the ability to generate unit tests from your database and run them through team build or msbuild.
Jamie did a great job of covering all of the features. There is a lot of flexibility – multiple connections can be used to tear down and set up to use a privileged account to set up data and an unprivileged account (web server, anyone?) to execute the procedures, test data can be deployed, schema changes can be deployed, the tests can be configured to run against a target server. This is an impressive addition to the tool box of any DBA or database developer.
The options for test development are opened up, too. It’s possible to write unit tests in T-SQL or any .NET language – DBAs, database developers, and application developers can write unit tests. It’s also possible to create custom data generators and custom test conditions as well as code analysis rules.
Oh, this will work against SQL Server 2000, 2005, or 2008. That’s right, you can use this without upgrading your database, you just need Visual Studio.
Partition Alignment
Jimmy May presented on partition alignment. I knew a little bit about this problem going in, but he really made it make sense to me. I know my limitations and I know that I couldn’t adequately explain this topic, so I’ll defer to Brent Ozar’s article: Jimmy May explains Partition Alignment.
VOTE!
You should have received an email about how to vote for the SQL Server board. If you’re attending the conference and you haven’t, get down to the PASS booth and mention that you haven’t received your instructions on how to vote. It’s very important that you watch the candidate videos and get out there and vote. It’s fun AND it’s free!
Other recaps
Brent Ozar has beaten me to the punch with recap of today’s activities
