Facility9

Thursday

After the Thursday’s keynote, I spent some time talking with Brent and meeting various vendors and conference attendees. It’s been good to have a little bit of time to relax, I’ve found.

After lunch, I attended Paul Nielsen’s and Louis Davidson’s presentation on smart database design. If they present on this topic, I definitely suggest that you attend it. In addition to being a hilarious presentation given by two exceptionally smart men, I took a lot away from it. One of the biggest things is the universal answer to almost any question: ‘It depends.’ There isn’t a magic solution. Throughout the presentation, Louis and Paul provided a lot of tools and rationale to use to make the decisions when a hard and fast answer isn’t immediately available. This was the best luck I had with sessions all day.

In the afternoon, I attended a SQLCAT session on Large Scale Relational Data Warehouse Learnings. There was some great material presented. Unfortunately, the bulk of it went over my head and I left the session about halfway through it.

In the day’s final session, I attended a Session on Integrated Business Intelligence Solutions. I learned a bit about building cubes with BIDS, but for the most part this was an introduction to report builder. I left early and was greeted by a book from Louis Davidson. I went to the SQL Server Heroes Unite event, but I left early because, frankly, I was exhausted from all of the learning, networking, and socializing.

Friday

Friday morning’s keynote by David Dewitt was amazing. He clearly explained the technology behind Gemini will work on a more technical level. Normally this would be a difficult subject to comprehend, but David made great use of his slides to clearly explain the core concepts in a clear manner.

I, once again, missed the morning session while I spent time socializing and getting to know my friends.

When the conference started, I had originally planned to spend my time on the Application Development track. However, after the first day I realized that the most important thing that I would get out of the summit was to expand my knowledge and get out of my comfort area and learn more about different aspects of SQL Server. With this in mind, I attended Donald Farmer’s session on Integrating Predictive Analysis Throughout the Data Lifecycle. Brent Ozar did a great job of summarizing Donald’s presentation. One of the most interesting things that Donald showed was how to use an existing corpus of data to perform form validation based on trends in the existing data to determine if data is valid within statistical norms.

Later in the afternoon, while loitering around in the hallway with a few others, Donald Farmer came along and said hello to us. Within a few minutes we were interactively mining his sample data on Titanic survivors. This emphasizes how easy it is to use these new tools to mine and analyze the data on the fly to produce a better, or different, understanding of the body of data.

The final session of the data was Louis Davidson’s talk on Why Normalization Matters. Louis is just as engaging of a presenter on his own as he was with Paul Nielsen. While there was some review here, the important thing wasn’t the material in the presentation. The important thing was the understanding and the explanation that Louis brought to the material. Ultimately, the main point that Louis made was that if you think about table design carefully and intelligently, it’s very easy to design tables and the relationships between them. The main reason that many databases are not in third or fourth normal form isn’t that it’s difficult it’s that people try to take shortcuts designing or extending a database. Of course, the only way to do things right is to practice.

Everything else

The 2008 PASS Summit was my first conference and was a great experience for me. I got to meet a lot of great people, volunteer and provide help for an organization that I enjoy being a part of, and learn more than I ever thought I would learn in a week about parts of SQL Server that I never thought I would have a chance to look into.

Social networking made this all easier. By using twitter, I was able to keep in touch with all of my friends, get tips on sessions to attend, and coordinate attending sessions together. TJay Belt posted a great blog summarizing how we were able to use twitter during the conference to keep in touch, network, coordinate, help each other out, and socialize.

PASS was a great experience, it gave me an additional dimension to my understanding of my own skills and of SQL Server as an entire family of products and something more than just a relational database engine.

Liveblogging the PASS Summit 2008 final day keynote. Refresh this page for news. Or, better yet, visit Brent Ozar’s coverage for additional info.

10:04 Parallel optimization is hard. Very hard. There’s a lot going on when the data is distributed across multiple nodes. Gray Systems Lab is working with DATAllegro to solve these problems. There are a great number of challenges that are up ahead. Big things are coming (har har har).

10:02 Partition skew is a concern when fragments/nodes don’t end up containing the same number of rows. How does this get solved? You can use range partitioning or you can change the hash function you’re using to partition the table.

9:57 Table repartitioning makes it possible to shuffle rows around so that all of Bob’s order rows are on the same server as Bob’s customer data rows. Joins can happen locally once you do this, even though you have a giant lump of data spread across a huge number of nodes.

9:50 This is very interesting stuff and I would encourage anyone interested to get a hold of the video of the keynote. I’m trying to keep up with all of this and blogging is getting in the way. Blogging will resume when the subject changes.

9:35 He’s now explaining how this would all work in a real system, not just in theory. The magic is that the software makes this all transparent outside of the database. There are no indexes, sadly, but queries take less time because they are distributed. Brent Ozar has a good overview of what’s going on from an engine perspective. Check it out.

9:30 Hash partitioning explained now. This is great… he’s explaining how it works and what’s wrong with it.

9:23 Horizontal partitioning is up now. This is some really really cool stuff… Round Robin partitioning is up now, also very cool. The problem is that you can’t tell where a row lives.

He’s showing all of this with animated slides. There’s very little to try to comprehend – he’s just showing it.

9:20 There’s a picture of a cluster of VAX machines. Oh, VAX.

9:16 Shared Memory (everything is shared in one machine) doesn’t scale up very well, the hardware doesn’t scale up very well up at all.

Share Disk is where nodes of commodity hardware uses local storage. There’s still limited scaleability here, too.

Shared Nothing is where you have commodity hardware with dedicated disk and memory. Everything is connected via commodity hardware. This can scale as long as you have money to buy commodity hardware. This is how the big boys do it.

9:15 Apparently, eBay has two 2 petabyte systems and one 5 petabyte systems. That’s a lot of data! He’s describing how the basic forms of scaling work.

9:10 The reason we need to know about this is because this is the theory behind the new DATAllegro products that are coming out next year. The point of doing linear speed up and linear scale up is to add hardware resources incrementally (10% more data? 10% more resources)

9:06 David Dewitt, a technical fellow with Microsoft and Ph.D. holder, is coming on stage now for the last keynote. He gets Alice Cooper as welcome music. He’s going to be talking about parallel DBs for scaleability.

9:00 Patrick is continuing to show different hardware that could be used and why you’d want to use it to meet your needs. This is a review of a white paper that’s available through Dell. Basically, add more servers to the query layer to meet load and distribute the data from the processing layer. Once you get more load in the processing layer… add more servers.

8:55 The first speaker is Patrick Otriz – Solutions Architect with Dell. What Dell doesn’t do is application development – Patrick’s job is to drive consistency around what Dell does – meet Service Level Agreements and establish business continuity plans. He’s describing the full stack and the problems that people will be facing at the hardware level.

8:48 SQL Heroes Contest winners are going to be announced. This was to create a project on codeplex using SQL Server. There has been an effort to get community sample applications that run along side the Microsoft sample databases – the SQL Heroes Contest. 60% of the submissions were from outside of the United States. Didn’t have time to type all of them out before the list was off the screen, hopefully the list will be published somewhere. (thanks to Adam Machanic, they’re Extended Events Manager, SSISUnit, CDC Helper, and QPee tools by Jason Massie!)

8:44 Bill Graziano came out riding on a tricycle. Early bird discount is $995 if you register before December 31st, act now! The summit will be in Seattle, Nov 3-6 in 2009.

PASS is looking for content either through videocasts (PASSTips) showing off new features or through technical articles.

Three new board members have been elected:

• Douglas McDowell
• Lynda Rab
• Andy Warren