See YOU at the Virtual Conference
20 different speakers are pulling together their excellent content, approaches and ideas and presenting it to you! SQL Server tips, best practices, tools, tuning and much more. Business Intelligence tips, approaches and specific how-to information, SharePoint information on setting up and administering SharePoint systems – all of this and a ton of different, entirely new and fresh sessions. Where else can you attend a conference online – a REAL conference – with 75+ sessions, and a lot of interaction, live chat, session replays, session transcripts and downloads…
Mark your calendars now for April 7, 8 and 9th – and get more information or register here. (Yes, group discounts are available too! Here’s the form.)
Webcast: SQL Server Forensics
Have you ever received a call from one of your users asking why they received an error 3 days ago? Or maybe they want to know when a particular piece of data was deleted and who did it. Troubleshooting past events is difficult in SQL Server, but not always impossible. Learn how to set up a SQL Server to be able to respond these questions and how to use resources within SQL Server and other application logs to track down activity that otherwise might be lost. Presented by: Sarah Barela
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> Live date: 4/14/2010 at 12:00 Pacific
Virtualization – How Are Things Changing? Feedback…
I love the SSWUG.ORG readers! Such great feedback – send in your notes here.
George writes – "The main problem will always be one of storage subsystem and I/O. The biggest challenge with SQL virtualization, I believe, is how to optimize the storage back-end, especially with so many IT shops deciding to go with iSCSI NAS solution for their guest OS farm. IMO, NIC vendors have been slow to address all the bugaboos with TCP offload technology, which is vital to a successful SQL virtualization solution with few bottlenecks. From personal experience, until I can fix a network perf issue without disabling TCP offload, it will be difficult to sign off with confidence on a virtual SQL environment."
From Rick – "My personal findings? The Operations (that’s what we call the guys that are in charge of the server hardware, and the OS) people have been convinced by the vendors that the (insert latest technology here) is the greatest thing ever, and therefore perfect for hosting our SQL Servers. I’m mostly referring to iSCSI storage currently, as that’s the latest thing the vendors have sold to our hardware guys. The problem is that we test the setup on a new iSCSI device, then end up with a variety of systems sharing the same “shelves” (sets of drives) and the result is slower than expected performance. At that point it’s very hard (apparently) to tell what’s using the I/O, and also to then make any changes, as a new shelf of drives is prohibitively expensive, and it’s a decent sized process to move the SQL Server to a new shelf of drives. Plus, the hardware guys are still convinced (by the vendors) that this solution is great, and there couldn’t be anything wrong with it. Again, since it’s hard to tell what’s using the I/O, it’s hard to give them metrics as to why/how this isn’t performing well.
At least in our solution the VMs and the iSCSI are synonymous. Maybe this was a slightly off-topic rant, but I feel better at least!"
…and Arturo writes – "I’m using SQL 2008 under Virtual Windows 2003 Server, our company is small (30 users) and only one database (1GB size). Virtualization has been a successful decision, security is guaranteed as well
database performance . Of course, we need a Virtual Server with high performance (processor, memory and hard disk). We are so happy using this technology, So as you say “depends”. I think largest company using bigger databases should use physical Server."
Webcast: Basics of Administering Databases for The Layman – Part 3
Okay, so you’ve gotten your data into your database. Did you do it right? Do you have too much data? Do you have the right data? Can you actually get the data out that you want? Now how do you get it out? This session will take you through some examples of why you want to have less data in a database to be more accurate (normalization), how that’s done, and how it makes the data in your database more accurate. It also explains why, in certain circumstances, it could be beneficial not to do that. Topics included will be indexes: what, why, and how to use them, what the benefits are, what the tradeoffs are. Also, different ways to maintain them and why you want to do that, and why some of Microsoft’s canned maintenance plans can be a problem and where to look for solutions to those problems. Presented by: Tom Roush
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> Live date: 4/21/2010 at 12:00 Pacific