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 ...

This is the 124th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Welcome. Here’s what the Oracle blogosphere had to offer. On Oracle and more, Amardeep Sidhu announces the birth of the North India Oracle Users Group. Not too far away, on the AskDba.org Weblog gets the word out about a seminar by Tom Kyte on 18th December in Bangalore, arranged by the All India Oracle User Group. Vivek Sharma examined Library Cache ...

It’s Friday, it’s 8:30 AM, and it’s time for another keynote. 10:03 - Done. Wow, he was awesome for engine guys like me! Off to the sessions… 10:02 - DeWitt’s Gray Systems Lab is working with the DATAllegro team to build a new “world-class parallel optimizer” to make it easier to work around partition skew, among other things. Wow - brain power. “Microsoft intends to become the premier supplier of scalable database systems for data ...

It’s a simple matter to restore SQL Server backups to later versions, in fact you don’t need to do anything different but what about the other way around? I first got caught out with this back in the days of SQL Server 7 and 2000, and the basic answer is the same today for SQL Server 2008 as it was then – you can’t restore a backup from a newer version of SQL Server to ...

Among the interesting stuff discussed at last nights SQL community meeting at the Microsoft Campus,was a lively debate on whether to wait for SQL Server 2008 sp1. The traditional view has been to wait until sp1 because that is the stable release. One wit in the audience suggested that SQL Server 2008 was really SQL Server 2005 sp4 and therefore everyone should go right ahead. While SQL Server 2008 is actually a lot more than ...

I’ll be liveblogging this morning’s keynotes at the PASS Summit. Refresh this page for the latest news. 10:02 - Tom’s focusing on the ROI of BI, and suddenly I get it. The database engine works great. Now we’re bolting things on top of it to make every end user in the company see the value of using SQL Server as their engine. Before things like this, you could have swapped back ends with MySQL, Oracle, ...

10:06 SQL Server 2008 is going to increase productivity, once these new features are available we’ll be able to leverage additional tools both as data people and as consumers and users of data. Office and Excel are going to be huge in the future, combined with SharePoint and PerformancePoint. These new tools, the new vision is going to be amazing! 10:04 The users are able to serve themselves. This is very very important to the ...

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 ...

Aside from my liveblog of Ted Kummert’s keynote this morning and Jimmy May’s presentation on partition alignment, a few other things caught my eye today. I talked to JC Cannon about his SQL Server 2008 Compliance Guide. I’ve written here about it before, but it bears repeating. If you’re not here at PASS, and you wish you were, you can get a taste of the educational experience by going through that guide. It’s extremely well-written, ...

We stumbled across this great little video of our gloves in action this morning - as created by a YouTuber called czdjax from the Czech Republic. The clip shows a customer using Etre Touchy to get to grips with his iPhone, PDA and mobile phone, and vividly demonstrates how they help you to avoid the fat-fingering issues that plague users of normal gloves!

Before attending this session, I’ve always gone to KB article 929491 article on partition alignment. I thought I kinda sorta understood what was going on, but Jimmy’s presentation drew on the best graphical illustrations to show it. Not to mention his audio stylings like, “Holy correlated wait stats!” Get your binoculars out Partition alignment is one of those hidden performance tweaks that makes a big (10-20-30%) performance impact. Windows 2008 (and Vista) fixed this, but ...

I just discovered PhoneGap. Excited would be an understatement .... http://phonegap.com/

I’m liveblogging the keynote this morning on here and on my Twitter feed. Go to this page and refresh it periodically to get the latest news as it happens. Updates are at the top of the page to make reading easier during liveblogs, and I’ll reverse it tonight for easier reading later. 10:08 - And that’s it! Done. See you at PASS! 10:06 - Donald got a great reaction from the attendees. Kummert’s thanking the ...