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European PASS Conference 2010, Day 2

Long day
The second day was a long day. A lot of sessions and I especially attended sessions about subjects that I am not familiar with.

And, of course, there were prizes to be won. And just like last year, I won a prize. This time it is a free Microsoft TechNet Subscription. But since I already have an MSDN subscription it is of no use to me. If I can make anybody happy with it, please contact me at hmelissen@ambitionit.nl or leave a reply at this blog.

SQL Azure
The second day of the European PASS Conference 2010 started (for me) with a session by Lubor Kollar (Microsoft CAT Team) about SQL Azure. Lubor is one of the architects of SQL Azure and he taught us, among other things, the top 5 lessons learned:

  1. Use short connections since connections over the internet may drop (see below).
  2. Do not use physical and database level settings in your design and in the code.
  3. Reconsider or drop High Availability and Data Recovery.
  4. Connect to SQL Azure via Windows Azure (it is faster and the data traffic within the data center is free).
  5. Monitor and debug performance using DMVs.

Connections may be dropped because of

  • Network problems
  • Inactivity for more than 30 minutes
  • Overload
  • Database failover activity

I find it sorry that Database Mail is currently not supported in SQL Azure; therefor it is hard to make a good use case for my clients.

Speed
Then on to Davide Mauri (Solid Quality Mentors). He showed the differences between set based approaches and non-set based approaches. His examples showed that using common table expressions (CTE's) with row_number() and 'partition by' can solve many common scenarios.

StreamInsight
Allan Mitchell (Konesans) explained the key terms for StreamInsight like Complex Event Processing (CEP), event types (interval, point and edge), factories, adapters and LINQ.

And there appears to be some confusion about StreamInsight vs. Reactive Framework. The latter has been introduces in Microsoft .Net 4.0 and it appears to the same as StreamInsight: monitor streaming data and react on the data. Are two Microsoft teams working on the same functionality?

Sharepoint
Steffen Krause (Microsoft) pointed out some considerations for SQL Server administrators when dealing with Sharepoint. The most important warning is: do not access the database directly, but always use the Sharepoint interface.

Master Data Management
Markus Thomanek (Microsoft) closed the day explaining Master Data Management. For me this was a tough session, because I have not yet tried this functionality.

Thanks
Thank you all for organizing this event. See you next year.

posted @ Friday, April 23, 2010 5:57 PM

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