SQL 2008 SP1

Service Pack 1 for SQL 2008 is ready for download.  There isn’t much new functionality in SP1.  Microsoft has made an effort to release a functionality complete piece of software, hence no new stuff.

One thing I saw that I thought was cool was that Report Builder 2.0 one-click is now included.  I did think it was strange that if you clicked “Report Builder” in Reporting Services Manager you got Report Builder 1.0.  Anyways, that won’t happen any more.

Here is the link:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=66ab3dbb-bf3e-4f46-9559-ccc6a4f9dc19

SDS Announcement

Looks like SDS is going to support the regular old relational paradigm sooner rather than later:

http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/archive/2009/03/10/what-s-next-for-sql-data-services.aspx  (Thanks to Neil Wood for the link.)

Now this is interesting.  Now someone could move (without much work) their OLTP system to the cloud and have MS manage it.  All you’d need is a big pipe to the MS data center.  Well – assuming you don’t use features they don’t implement.  All they mention here is tables, columns and stored procedures.  I suppose things like triggers may not be implemented soon, but we’ll overlook that for now.

More straight forward might be moving a big data warehouse to the cloud.  Having MS manage my 1 tb warehouse might make a lot of sense – especially if I get some sort of IOs per sec SLA.

My big question is will they protect users from themselves?  Before putting a large database into production will MS like to have a code review of your stored procedures and ERD?  What about queries that are long running?  Will they kill them if they run for over a minute or two?  Will the be a cap on size?

I’m not knocking this down before it starts – I’m just curious how this will play out.  There is a good reason why companies might like to move SQL off site.  It will probably be cost effective.  This is going to be worth watching.

RDBMS Doomed?

Here is a great article from Read Write Web that discusses the place and uses for a Key/Value database such as SSDS or SimpleDB or Google App Engine.  Jason Massie argues that the DBA profession will level off in 5-7 years and then start to fall off in 10 because of the prevelence of cloud based Key/Value based databases.

During the last couple of releases of SQL Server, Microsoft has been focused on BI.  Why?  Everyone has lots of data.  Everyone knows that there is a lot of value in that data, but they need to get at it.  BI is one of the top agenda items for CIOs according to Gartner.

What does this have to do with SSDS and SimpleDB?

SSDS and SimpleDB have basically no reporting or analytics capabilities.  Microsoft has mentioned that the future for SSDS includes OLAP like capabilities.  Even if this was available today and shipped today, would companies be ready to move their entire data ecosystem to Microsoft, Amazon, or Google, re-write everything out of RDBMS and into Key/Value programming, then re-work ETL and data warhouse infrasturcture to work on a non-existant (so far, Microsoft says) architecture?

They sure aren’t going to move all of the OLTP systems they have to the cloud right now because the data is then trapped in a no-reporting storage mechanism.  Google App Engine only allows 1000 result objects per query.  Amazon only allows 5 second duration queries.  Can companies’ appetite for analytics be satiated by that?  I don’t think so.

This seems a very log way off.  Even if one of these Key/Value databases HAD reporting and analytics, it seems a minimum of 5 to 7 year for any sizable amount of migration to take place.  And this would be if there WERE analytics and reporting.  There aren’t.

Many companies have large amounts of data and money in their VSAM/COBOL systems that are still running fine that everyone said would have to have been replaced a decade ago.  Those systems aren’t going anywhere for quite a while and these systems need analytics.  These analytics will need to be done on-sight on RDBMS/OLAP platforms.

I suppose for a San Francisco-based startup-focused DBA, there might be a noticible movement to the cloud, but for the rest of the world, it is going to take longer than 5 years to notice a plateau in the need for RDBMS DBAs.

I will however conceede that at some point, there will be a draw to the cloud.  But there are many hurdles to overcome before that can happen in earnest.

One change might be a cloud hosted RDBMS.  Certainly there are some out there somewhere, but the hot topic right now is Key/Value and how that enables large distributed systems.  For a company looking to save money, a hosted RDBMS makes sense, but probably not SSDS and Key/Value.

Float Data Types

This is a really big distinction but is only mentioned in passing in BOL (check here), but approximate numerics are just that:  approximate.  Someone who understands the storage engine better can explain why a foat or real can’t store an exact number, but they can’t and don’t.  You might put 1.5 into it and later come to find that the value is 1.4999.

If you need an exact representation of a number that isn’t an integer, you need to use numeric or decimal.  These are functionally the same, so it doesn’t matter which you choose.

Farewell PerformancePoint Planning!

Chris Webb has the scoop here: http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!7B84B0F2C239489A!4133.entry

What a shift in the Microsoft BI stack.  You can’t show the BI Burger to your clients anymore.  Maybe there was not enough demad for the planning peice for Microsoft to justify continuing the development and sales effort around the product.  Now we have yet another example of an acquisition that soon was re-worked and then kill by the acquirer.

I have also heard rumors that Gemini might be something to take the place of the planning piece.  You’d need some sort of workflow engine, but maybe it could work.  We’ll see.

Also, the layoffs affected the sales area in BI significantly so MS is definitely cutting their loss in BI.  I agree with Chris that it is important for Microsoft to publish some sort of new roadmap.  It makes it hard for partners to invest in new Microsoft products if they kill them off so soon after launch.

Wow.