Microsoft's Modern Data Warehouse

This article “Modernizing” Your Data Warehouse with Microsoft depicts how the new Microsoft data platform stack fits together.  This article also makes reference to The Modern Data Warehouse  paper from The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) providing interesting insight into the future of data warehousing. The replacement of data warehouse platforms over the next 3 years will empower organizations in their quest to leverage big data, provide more business insight, integrate platforms and provide scalability. The Microsoft Whitepaper provides further information.

SQL Saturday Exeter #269

I attended and helped at the second SQL Saturday in Exeter held on 21st and 22nd March 2014. The event was bigger than last year brimming with excellent speakers. 

The event was preceded by the SQLSouth West user group meeting on UDF's. The Precon I attended was excellent on SQL Server 2014 with a deep dive on new features.  The new features covered In-Memory OLTP (Hekaton), In-Memory DW (Column Store), SysPrep etc.

Windows components including SMB3 allow SQL to store data files with remote shared folders. Fibre channel support enables SQL VM's to directly connect to fibre channels, ReFs provide better protection for SQL Data with background check sum processes in resilient file systems and Tiered storage space improved flexible SQL Storage through storage pools. 

Resource Governor can allocate pools set for IOPS limits. In addition there are lots of improvements that are turned off by default. 

PowerShell and its box of tricks presentation, showed the wealth of flexibility for managing a large volumes of SQL Server. The corresponding blog box-of-tricks

Development insights mentioned were A Community Challenge  blog which documented a talk on Query Progress Tracking in SQL Server  that uses  the html-query-plan tool. The tool to download for displaying SQL query execution plans as HTML is here .

Uncovering hidden gems in execution plans provided useful insight with further exploration through sys.dm_exec_cached_plans and sys.dm_exec_query_plan. There were many other very interesting sessions covering Data Quality Services, Hadoop for the Microsoft Guy.

A Special SQL Supper

The Microsoft Data Platform Group, Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise Platform Group from Redmond came to discuss SQL Server 2014, Windows Azure SQL Database and SQL Server.

SQL Server 2014 key new feature areas:

Breakthrough Performance and Scale

In Memory OLTP

In Memory Column Store

SSD Buffer Pool Extension

Enhanced High Availability

AlwaysOn enhancements

Online Database Operations

Hybrid Solution

Backup to Azure

High Availability to Azure VM

Migration

Windows Azure is now accredited for ISO 27001 compliance. More details

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/trust-center/compliance/

Which Chart to Use

Choosing the right chart is important when displaying results as the charts tell a story.

This diagram provides a great starting place for decisions on which type of chart to use. Whether it be for comparison, distribution, relationship or composition.


http://extremepresentation.typepad.com/files/choosing-a-good-chart-09.pdf

SQL Relay R2

The second SQL Relay event this year was kicked off in Reading. I again was pleased to help out at this event. Microsoft opened with the Cloud OS Vision. The premise of how it unlocks insights on any data, transforms the datacentre, empowers people-centric  IT and enables modern business applications.  The future is about hybrid IT, and with the data explosion and rapid evolution being underway a rapid lifecycle is required.   There is a continuous offering from private to public cloud with various taxonomies towers; Physical, Virtual, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

There was a session on the new engine taken from this paper, SQL Server 2014 In-Memory OLTP (“Hekaton”)Whitepaper for CTP2 by Kalen Delaney.

An interesting sessionwas delivered positioning Enterprise Information Management including MDS, DQS and Integration Services. For clarity these services were defined as

DQS (Data Quality Services) is a knowledge driven data quality solution enabling IT pros and data stewards to easily improve the quality of their data

MDS (Master Data Services) is the set of data objects at the centre of business activities (customers, products, cost, locations, assets, tasks etc.)

There were many other great sessions during the day.