Great Whitepaper in the Library
Have you seen the whitepaper in the library – "What to Expect from SQL Server 2008?" Get some solid information about things that are coming, what to expect and what to plan for. You can download your copy here.
Chris Shaw’s Report from SQL Server Connections
(Our own Chris Shaw is at SQL Server Connections in Florida and will be keeping us updated on news, observations and other information while he’s there. This is his first report…)
Time to dust of the shoulder pads and jump back into the conference halls, SQL Connections first day was Monday and I had a chance to take in the sessions. The interesting this here is it looks like most of the Microsoft Speakers were on today for the “Microsoft day”. There was a large variety of sessions with 3 tracks dedicated to SQL Server and 2 tracks dedicated to SharePoint sessions. As always, everyone at lunch was running around to get their badge scanned and the entry form stamped to win that Harley.
In today’s session I got my first look into SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Report builder, WOW is all I can say Jason Carlson did a great job showing and talking about how the CSV rendering was redesigned, and then moved right into showing us how we can now export reports into a Word Format. The new Report Builder is a full feature design surface. An hour long session just was not enough to cover what this tool can do.
The Resource Governor session was one of my most anticipated sessions that I attended today. I was really looking forward to see how Microsoft intends for this to be used. The Demos that Boris Baryshnikov did a great job on showing how a reporting group of users could be limited to only certain amounts of hardware. There were some downfalls in the feature set that I am not sure how we will see it played out when 2008 is released. One is that this feature set is only open to those you purchase the Enterprise Edition the other was shared by Boris where if it is used in a situation where there really are not that many transactions you may not see the benefits of using the resource governor.
As always my narrow mind is sent into a spin when I sit down at lunch and start talking to other speakers. The options for resource governor and how they could be applied in my mind were limited to people running reporting on the same machine as their production server. After talking to Mike White, Co-Author of the SQL Server 2008 Bible I had many new opinions. I am looking forward to hearing more about this tool.
Featured White Paper(s)
Transforming Enterprise Backups: How Using a Third-Party Tool Can Improve Backup Strategies
The backup and restore facilities in native SQL Server are robust, and once a backup routine is established, the DBA needs to… (read more)
How to Deal with managing jobs and job failures in Multiple Data Centers
As a SQL Server DBA, I have often found myself stretched pretty thin trying to monitor SQL Server Agent across a plethora o… (read more)