Dave Campbell Keynote at SQL PASS
Dave Campbell has started his keynote, talking about moving to SQL Server 2005, answering the why, when, and what. Wow, his first set of features he mention are Trusted Platform, the security features that I see as the most compelling reason to move to the new version. That’s been something that not many people have talked about yet, at least in yesterday’s keynote and the sessions I attended (the SQLCLR mentioned it just in passing).
His Top 10 Reasons to Upgrade was good. Best was “So Kalen and Itzik can publish their ‘Inside’ books”. A very good hint, you guys! He went through them too fast for me to record them all, but I hope they’ll be published somewhere.
Server Status Reports
Oooo, the Configuration Changes Report is nice. Hmm, but probably not for me as a developer. Now a DBA can actually, by default, monitor what I’m doing on a server, without doing any setup ahead of time. The angst between DBAs and devs gets uglier….
Seriously, these are some nice reports you can get in Management Studio to monitor the health of the server, or the database if you select it in the Object Explorer, way better than what you could get in Enterprise Manager. The only downside: it’s going to make those Oracle dweebs more fuel to critisize how SQL Server DBAs are GUI hacks. Nyaa, nyaa! (And it’s going to reduce the need for many third party products for this kind of monitoring, alas. Yet another reason I’m glad I’m not into Microsoft add-on products, since they’ll just add it to the next version.)
Migration
Very gutsy migration demo. Dave found five attendees to be on-stage guinee pigs for upgrading to 2005. They have their laptops on stage and will do a live conversion. It’s all to show off SQL Server 2005 Upgrade Advisor. I hope it’s better than the conversion tools in Visual Studio. (Heh. I suspect that upgrading databases is more straightforward than random code, but we’ll see. And what security state does it leave the server in?) You can download it from somewhere on microsoft.com. It doesn’t require SQL Server 2005 but does require .NET framework 2.0.
The advisor analyzes the server and takes a few minutes to run. (Yikes, one of the people on stage has 12 kids, shown on his desktop. That led to the best joke of the conference so far: If he was an Oracle DBA, he’d only have three kids. LOL!) Anyway, the advisor looks to be well-designed, with lots of feedback about what it does and doesn’t check, issues you need to know about both before and after upgrading. It’s cool that it catches syntax changes that are deprecated, such as outer join operators *= and =*.
Hmm. SQL Server 2005 Agent doesn’t support SQL authentication? I’ll have to think through the implications of that, but I guess it’s more of a DBA issue. Something to be aware of though.
It’s nice that they found five people with vastly different types of applications that use lots of different SQL Server features.
Check out www.sqlserverchopper.com …it’s a site that is loosely based on the OC Choppers show where you might win an OC motorcycle when you migrate from Oracle to SQL Server 2005 and tell Microsoft about it.
Wow, customers have seen 11x speedup in stored procedures converted to CLR??? That is going to be a compelling reason to move more stuff from T-SQL. I’ll have to find out more about this statistic. Were the procs likely candidates for CLR based on what Microsoft has been recommending?
When?
He didn’t spend a huge amount of time on the when question, in this SQL Server-friendly crowd. But it’s telling that Microsoft is eating its proverbial dogfood, having moved to 2005 for many of its critical apps. No report if it’s caused any disasters, but maybe we’ll hear when they file their next SEC reports. Heh.
What?
The first demo of what is cool in 2005 is a demo of using a smart card as the key for data encryption. That’s a great use of encryption in SQL Server, allowing per-user encryption for secure data. Very cool use with the smart key features of Windows. You’d need to carefully consider how to handle lost smart cards and the need to change the smart card key to re-encrypt the data. But that is a small issue given the huge benefit of properly using encryption. Encryption isn’t as easy as Microsoft would have us believe based on simple demos, but the infrastructure is great.
Good keynote. SQL Server 2005 is very cool, ever more a compelling upgrade. On to sessions!