SQL Server 2012 RC0 and beyond

Since the stable and mainly feature-complete versions of SQL Server 2012 have been available, I have been heads-down on multiple BI projects using this software.  SQL Server 2012 is not just the next, incremental build of the same database platforms with a few added features here and there.  No, SQL Server 2012 ushers in a new era of user-driven BI analytics and data visualization.

Here’s a little information about my upgrade experience.  First of all, let’s talk about where we are in the pre-release cycle.  Release Candidate 0 was made available to the general public about a month ago.  There was talk about another, internal build with bug fixes and some added BI model functionality & Power View features.  If this internal release were to actually exist and if it had been made available to yours truly, the existence of such a product build would be protected under a non-disclosure agreement with Microsoft and I would not be at liberty to tell you that I had it installed not to discuss any details.

I started with a completely working install of SQL Server 2008 R2, including all SQL Server services and a SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition farm with Reporting Services & PowerPivot integration.  When attempting to upgrade from 2008 R2 to 2012 RC0, setup would freeze and become inoperable.  There were several issues, all of which I don’t remember but the a did not go well.  At that point, I rolled my machine back to a snapshot and performed a side-by-side installation of 2012 with all services, alongside the existing 2088 R2 install. Both cohabitated and worked well.  Moving the content databases was done manually but it went smoothly.  I then manually migrated all the user databases by detaching them from the 2008 R2 instance and then attaching them to the 2012 RC0 instance.  I got there but it was on the long road.

What about the alledged more-recent, internal, super-secret build that no one knows about?  If it did in-fact exist, and if I did in fact have a copy; it would have installed seamlessly and the upgrade from 2012 RC0 would have gone very smoothly.  If that did indeed happen, I would hev been quite pleased that the upgrade from RC0 went quite well.  Nudge nudge, wink wink - it looks like the upgrade story is good news.

SQL Server 2012 RC0 Released Today

It’s exciting to see all the pieces of SQL Server 2012 coming together.  Many new and compelling features have been in development for several years.  Today we finally get to see which features have made the cut and will ship in the released product in a few months.  Release Candidate 0 (RC0) can be downloaded here.

I’ve been watching this product for more than two years since the product teams gave MVPs and selected partners our first look at the SQL Server "Denali" software development review back in October, 2009.  Since then, we’ve been meeting with the developers, leaders and program managers in review discussions and insider first-look sessions every few months.  This release will be bigger and more capable than any before.

Of course, I’m paying attention to the revolutionary business intelligence features; SSRS alerting, BISM tabular models, and the crème de la crème: Power View.  Take a look at this post on Robert Bruckner’s blog for a comprehensive demonstration of the Power View features added since CTP3. 

Image courtesy of Robert Bruckner

All of these capabilities will be covered extensively on the next release of our Wrox Press Professional series book on Reporting Services.

SolidQ Announces BI Center of Excellence

Carl Rabeler, SharePoint and SQL BI Expert Formerly With Microsoft SQLCAT, Rejoins SolidQ as Director of the Business Intelligence Center of Excellence.

Under Carl Rabeler’s direction, SolidQ’s Business Intelligence Center of Excellence (BI CoE) will assist customers and partners around the world by providing architectural support, security review, mentoring, content delivery, as well as content development. The BI CoE will complement SolidQ’s delivery and training initiatives by leveraging BI CoE resources for advanced training, and on projects for complicated requirements, security, and integration. According to Erik Veerman, BI Director for SolidQ North America, "The BI Center of Excellence makes sense for us and our customers. Whether enterprise data warehouse, cloud services, or self-service BI in SharePoint, we can better serve our customer needs with the BI CoE’s industry leading expertise. We’re excited to have Carl heading up this new initiative."

Follow these links to read the entire press release: MarketWatch, SolidQ

Best PASS Summit Ever (so far)

I have to admit that the 2011 PASS Summit was such an amazing experience and there was so much to say that I honestly didn’t know where to start.  It’s been three days since returning from this year’s PASS Global Summit in Seattle and I’m just now getting my thoughts collected.  Every event and every session I attended was absolutely amazing.  I met many positive and enthused people who are thrilled to be associated with the SQL Server community. 

Please post a comment about your experience at PASS

It amazes me… How can there be so much genuine comradery and sense of community associated with a product?  Well, there isn’t, really. It’s not the product or even the company (Microsoft or any other organization) that  gets me charged up about events like PASS, SQL Saturday and so many of these gatherings.  Sure, we all make a living by doing something with SQL Server – a product that many of us thoroughly enjoy working with in some capacity and this gives us something in common.  This is a community made up of people who have a deep sense of trust and respect for each other – so much that they are willing to devote their time and energy, and go well beyond just the the business of SQL Server.  I think this is hard to convey to someone who hasn’t yet experienced it.  It’s a sense of belonging to a community that freely gives back when you make a commitment and give without any expectation.

This year I tried to give it my all and I got involved as much as I could.  Thank you to those who attended my two sessions.  I had a wonderful time presenting "Visual Report Design: Brining Sexy Back" and "Report Design for SSAS Cubes and MDX".  You’ll find my content here on the Presentations page.  I contributed a chapter to the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives, Volume 2; which was released and available at the conference.  This is one of the most comprehensive books ever written for SQL Server.  My contribution, by comparison, was very small but I am honored to be counted among the authors.  It was truly humbling to be signing books with some of the most respected members of the SQL Server MVP community.  Thanks again to Kalen Delaney, Paul Randall, Kimberly Tripp, Greg Low, Louis Davidson, Paul Nielson and many others for making this happen and inviting me to participate.  I hosted a table at the "Birds of a Feather" lunch on Self-Service BI and had a great conversation with many community members about their efforts and challenges.  I also had the opportunity to speak to attendees and answer questions at the BI Expert Pod and SQL Clinic hosted by the Microsoft SQL Server Customer Advisory Team (SQLCAT).  We also had several lunch and evening events where I enjoyed the company of past and present clients, working associates and fellow community members.

My efforts to blog and tweet from the Bloggers’ Table during the morning keynotes for three days were feeble but I learned some lessons.  With 3,500 people simultaneously accessing the conference wi-fi network, there just wasn’t enough bandwidth.  The seasoned bloggers all had air cards in their computers… and now I know what to do next year.  I did manage to get a few tweets out on my phone.

The three-day PASS Summit began on Wednesday, October 12th which followed the Oregon SQL Saturday full-day event and then a two-day SQL Server Insiders event in Redmond where MVPs and other invited partners sat with product team leaders to learn about product development in progress.  Needless to say, my brain was full before the end of the week.

In closing, I’ll say that the PASS leaders – who are all volunteers by the way – do an amazing job.  I had a chance to speak at length with Rashabh Mehta, current PASS President and Rick Heiges, PASS VP of Marketing about their experiences.  These people – along with the directors and many volunteers – give thousands of hours of their time without compensation.  Thank you for helping make this community so great!

PASS 2011 Summit–Day Two

From the Keynote Bloggers’ Table

The second day of PASS started with a keynote addressed that was as well attended as yesterday – probably about 3000.  The Wireless network was saturated once again.  During the session, I was able to post this draft and then a couple of revisions. I was only able to send tweets from my phone during the keynote (I managed to exhaust my phone battery by the afternoon by doing the same yesterday so I’m being a little more conservative today).

Today’s keynote presentations outlined features and capabilities of SQL Server 2012.

Bill Graziano started out by wearing a kilt on stage and recognizing all of the participants of the PASS Kilt Day

Quentin Clark let the presentation about the new capabilities on SQL Server 2012.

Top new capabilities in SQL Server 2012

Always On provides redirection to

Fast performance

Rapid Data Exploration

Managed Self-service BI

Credible, consistent data

Lori Edwards, @sqlgal, demonstrating a complete analytic & data quality.

Auditing

Peace of Mind

Brit on stage to demo appliances and PDW

Architecture is chosen and designed before selecting the hardware.  Not the other way around.

Showing us the Dell Parallel Data Warehouse.  Looks like an 8 foot tall rack .  Has 480 cores

Small: Business DW manages 1.5 TB

FASTTRACK 3.0 – Pre-configured to, plug in, load data & run in 20 min.

Extend  any data, anywhere

Statistical semantic search

Michael Rys on stage to demo

Used a very cool Silverlight app to search and show results.

Optimized productivity

SQL Server Data Tools (Project Juneau)

Scale on demand

Embeddable, portable database engine (no install)

SQL Azure

Nicholas Dritas, SQLCAT on stage to demo Azure

Mange Azure databases using SSMS – very cool

Backup Azure db from the client

Elastic scale

Cihan Biyikoglu

Sharing (Federations)

Demoing data form Blogs R Us, scalable blog service.

Real Time PASS 2011 Summit Announcements

Follow me for real-time updates from all three keynote sessions.  I will be blogging and tweeting from the Keynote Bloggers Table on Wed, Thurs & Friday morning starting at 8:30 am Pacific Time.  To stay tuned:

• Follow me at @paul_turley
• Follow the #SqlPASS hash tag
• Check this blog throughout the keynote sessions

The PASS Global Summit officially starts tomorrow morning.  The pre-conference sessions are running yesterday and today and I’m on the Redmond Microsoft campus attending the SQL Server Advisor’s Summit / Insider sessions.  This is going to be a great conference.  SQL Server “Denali” is nearing release in the next few months, there’s a lot of buzz about new BI capabilities and many new enterprise features.  Attendance this year is expected to set a new record with over 3,800 registrations.

Even if you couldn’t make it to Seattle to attend in person, you can keep up with announcements and stay connected with the SQL Server community. 

If you are attending, please come to my sessions on Wednesday morning and Friday afternoon.  I’m speaking at the very beginning and the very end of the conference at these times:

• Visual Report Design: Brining Sexy Back  (spotlight); Wed, Oct 12, 10:15am
• Multidimensional Reporting with MDX; Fri, Oct 14,  4:15pm

SQL Server MVP Deep Dives 2 Released

Exciting news…  The second edition of the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives book has been completed and is going to press in time for the PASS Global Summit!  There are two very good reasons that you should buy this book:

1) It is one of the most valuable books on the SQL Server platform, filled with insight and nuggets of knowledge from the best as brightest minds in the industry.
2) It’s an opportunity to give back.  Book sales support an important cause.

The book will be on sale at the conference book store and is available to pre-order on Amazon*  It can be purchased as an eBook or paperback from the publisher at http://www.manning.com/delaney/

It contains 60 chapters written by several of the Microsoft SQL Server MVPs.  Most of these industry leaders write their own books for other publishers and have collaborated to produce this unique book with all profits donated to charity.  This effort was led by Kalen Delaney, Paul Randal, Kimberly Tripp, Greg Low, Brad McGehee and Paul Nielsen.

I was privileged to write a chapter about designing Reporting Services reports with custom MDX queries for Analysis Services (Chapter 43 highlighted in the TOC below).

 

All profits from the book are donated to the Operation Smile program

www.operationsmile.org

From the publisher:

DESCRIPTION

Individually, each SQL Server MVP possesses an impressive wealth of knowledge and skill. Collectively, the 63 MVPs who contributed to SQL Server MVP Deep Dives, Volume II represent over 1000 years of daily experience in SQL Server administration, development, training, and design. This incredible book captures this expertise and passion in a collection of sixty concise chapters, each handpicked by lead editor Kalen Delaney and section editors Louis Davidson, Greg Low, Brad McGehee, Paul Nielsen, Paul Randal, and Kimberly Tripp, and written by an active SQL Server MVP.

This second volume picks up where the first SQL Server MVP Deep Dives leaves off, offering completely new content on topics ranging from testing and policy management to integration services, reporting, and performance optimization techniques. The chapters fall into five parts, Architecture and Design, Administration, Database Development, Performance Tuning and Optimization, and Business Intelligence.

This unique book is your chance to learn from the best in the business. It offers something of interest for any SQL Server pro at any level of experience.

About the Authors

This book includes contributions from 63 SQL Server MVPs. All chapters were selected and edited by Kalen Delaney and section editors Louis Davidson (Architecture and Design), Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp (Database Administration), Brad McGehee (Performance Tuning), Paul Nielsen (Database Development), and Greg Low (Business Intelligence).

Table of Contents:

Part I: ARCH/DESIGN
1 Where are My Keys?
2 "Yes, we are all individuals" (A look at uniqueness in the world of SQL)
3 Architectural Growth Pains
4 Characteristics of a Great Relational Database
5 Storage Design Considerations
6 Generalization – the key to a well-designed schema
Part II: ADMIN
7 Increasing Availability Through Testing
8 Page restores, the what how and why
9 Capacity Planning and Why DBA’s Should be doing it.
10 Discovering Your Servers with PowerShell and SMO
11 Will the Real Mr. Smith Please Stand Up?
12 Build your own SQL Server 2008 performance dashboard with CLR, DMVs and SQL Server Reporting Services
13 SQL Server Cost Recovery
14 Best Practice Compliance with Policy-based Management & Central Management Servers
15 Using SQL Server Management Studio to the Fullest
16 SQL Server 2008 R2 :: Multi-server management and Utility explorer—best tools for DBA
17 Top 10 SQL Server admin students misconceptions
18 High Availability of SQL Server in the context of Service Level Agreement
Part III: DB DEV
19 T-SQL: Bad Habits to Kick
20 Death By UDF
21 Using regular expressions in SSMS
22 SQL Server Denali: What’s Coming Next in T-SQL ?
23 Create your own data type
24 Extracting Data with Regular Expressions
25 Relational division – Practice uses of Relational Algebra
26 SQL FILESTREAM: To BLOB or not to BLOB
27 Writing unit tests for Transact-SQL
28 Getting Async with SQL Server Service Broker
29 Effective using of HierarchyId datatype
30 Let Service Broker Help You Scale Your Application
Part IV: PTO
31 Hardware 201: Selecting and Sizing Database Server Hardware
32 Parameter Sniffing: Your Best Friend… Except When It Isn’t
33 Investigating the Plan Cache
34 What are You Waiting for: An Introduction to Waits States & Queues
35 You See Sets, and I See Loops
36 Performance Tuning the Transaction Log for OLTP Workloads
37 Strategies for Unraveling Tangled Code
38 Use PAL to Analyze SQL Server Performance
39 Tuning JDBC for SQL Server
Part V: BI
40 Creating a Formal Reporting Services Report Part Library
41 Improving Report Layout and Visualization in SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services
42 Developing Sharable Managed Code Expressions in Reporting Services
43 Designing Reports with Custom MDX Queries
44 Building a Scale-Out SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services Farm
45 Creating SSRS Reports from SSAS
46 Optimizing SSIS for Dimensional Data Loads
47 SSIS Configurations Management
48 Exploring Different Types of Enumerators in the SSIS Foreach Loop Container
49 Late Arriving Dimensions in SSIS
50 Multiplying DBA Headcount with SSIS
51 Extending SSIS using the Script Component
52 ETL Design Checklist: Helping your Data Warehouse Succeed
53 Autogenerating SSAS Cubes
54 Scripting your Analysis Services Database—AMO and PowerShell, Better Together
55 Managing Context in MDX
56 Using Time Intelligence Functions in PowerPivot
57 Easy BI with the Silverlight PivotViewer
58 Excel as a BI Front-End Tool
59 Real-time BI with StreamInsight
60 BI Solution Development Design Considerations

 

*Amazon currently has the release date listed as October 28th but this will be revised.

SolidQ Journal September Edition

The 13th edition of The SolidQ Journal has just been released with several insightful articles and continued series updates.  In this edition:

• Fernando G. Guerrero:  editorial deals with Microsoft giving new wings to an entire industry
• Laurent Martin:  static relational interval trees, an article based on real customer needs
• Gilberto Zampatti:  best practices article on how to create and configure SharePoint service applications with PowerShell
• Rushabh Mehta:  continued series about the SSIS management framework
• Paras Doshi:  concluding article in the series on how to tune SQL Azure DBAs
• Pablo A. Ahumada:  how to design a dashboard using PerformancePoint Services.
• Salvador Ramos:  about how to use Excel in ETL processes
• Herbert Albert and Gianluca Hotz:  new series about using PowerShell to automate Excel tasks

The SolidQ Journal is a free publication from SolidQ to support the Microsoft SQL Server and Business Intelligence community.  Follow #SolidQ on Twitter.

Come to SQL Saturday 92 in Portland

Are you In Portland, Oregon?

Do you plan to be in Portland on Saturday, October 8th?

Can you be in Portland on October 8th?

…then go to the Oregon SQL Saturday #92. Register right now. Yes, now!

We have dozens of great speakers coming from all over the world.  It’s a terrific community networking opportunity, a career builder and an awesome learning experience.

Dad always said “there’s no free lunch” but he was wrong.  Lunch is provided and it’s free!  The conference is free!  What more could you possibly want?

If you have anything at all to do with SQL Server and you don’t make it to SQL Saturday #92 in Portland on October 8th, you will beat yourself over the head with a two-by-four after you find out what you missed.

24 Hours of PASS & SQL Saturday(s)

I survived 24 Hours of PASS!  Just wrapped up delivering my presentation for the 24 Hours of PASS (24HOP) on Visual Report Design.  I appreciate the 300+ attendees for showing up.  Thanks to Mark Ginnebaugh for moderating the session.

24HOP is a preview of sessions for the upcoming PASS Global Summit in October.  I did a mini version of my scheduled spotlight session “Visual Report Design: “Bringing Sexy Back”.  Its hard to get to the meat of a great topic in 45 minutes but I gave it my best shot.  I’m looking forward to having two more, slightly longer, practice runs at SQL Saturday 94 #sqlsat94 this Saturday (Sept 10) in Salt Lake City and SQL Saturday 92 #sqlsat92 (Oct 8th) in Portland, OR.

What Else Would You Like to See at PASS?

If you have questions, feedback or requests for future content, please contact me by commenting to this post and I will reply.

Rather then posting a copy of my PASS session deck, I’ll point you to the more detailed article on my blog titled “Let’s Get Visual: The Art of Report Design”.  Recordings for all the 24HOP sessions will be posted on the 24 Hours of PASS site in the next couple of weeks.  I will post my own recording as well. 

New Online BI Classes from SolidQ

SolidQ has recently added 22 new classes and a full schedule of available class times.  Formerly Solid Quality Training and Solid Quality Mentors, SolidQ is now offering online training classes on schedules convenient to Europe, Asia and the Americas.    Course are developed and taught by seasoned industry leaders and mentors who author books and lead enterprise projects.

Technology areas include: Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Database Administration, Database Design and Development, Mobile Development, .Net Development, SQL Microsoft Curriculum & SQL Server (2005, 2008, R2 & Denali)

Classes are offered in English, Spanish, German and Slovenian.  Several new BI courses include:

• SharePoint – Solution Design, Management & Administration & Business Intelligence
• Reporting Services – Design, Development & Administration
• Analysis Services – Solution Design, Management & Administration
• Integration Services – Enterprise ETL Design, Management & Administration
• Data Mining
• PowerPivot
• MDX
• SQL Server Performance Tuning
• End-to-End Business Intelligence Workshop

Visit SolidQ.com for the complete course catalog and schedule.

Read the SolidQ Journal for helpful articles and industry news.

Poll Results–SQL Server BI Tools

Back in June of this year, I asked readers to respond to three polls I posted about the use of Microsoft BI and SQL Server tools.  As of this posting, there have been 118 responses to these polls and I’ve included copies of the results below.  Thank you all for responding.  If you have not done so already, use the menu to go to “Polls” and add your contribution.

(updated 16 Sept, 2011 – there have been about 160 responses so far)

Poll results

 

 

 

 

 

SQL Saturday – Salt Lake and Portland

I will be speaking at two SQL Saturday events on the topics of visual report design with SQL Server Reporting Services and BI Semantic data options for analysis with the Microsoft BI platform.  In these presentations, I will demonstrate advanced report design techniques with the current version of Reporting Services and new features coming in SQL Server “Denali”, namely the new BI Tabular Model & the Project “Crescent” reporting experience.  Watch for a streaming video copy of this presentation in the next couple of weeks.  Stay tuned.

If you will be in the Salt Lake City area on Saturday, September 10th, please plan to attend SQL Saturday 94, Tweet: #sqlsat94.

The Oregon SQL user group is sponsoring SQL Saturday 92 in Portland on Saturday, October 8th.  This is sure to be well-attended with several excellent industry professionals presenting.  Tweet: #sqlsat92.

Please register as soon as possible.

SQL Server Denali CTP3 Released

The Community Technical Preview for SQL Server Denali was made available to the public today.  CTP1 was released last year at the PASS Summit in November but it did not contain any of the new BI features.  CTP2 was released only to members of the TAP and SQL Server MVPs in early spring.  CTP3 has been long-awaited.  We expect that it is nearly feature-complete and fairly stable since CTP2 was not bad, considering the addition of many radically new features.  Although, there has been no official announcement, we expect to see the final released candidates within the next few months. 

SQL Server Denali includes several enterprise class BI capabilities such as Project “Crescent” and the BI Semantic Model.

According to Thierry D’Hers, Group Program Manager for Reporting Services: “One of the key scenarios for Microsoft SQL Server Code Name “Denali” is the continuation of our self Service BI story which we introduced in SQL Server 2008 R2 with the introduction of PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint.”  Read his announcement on the product team blog.

SQL Server CTP3 can be downloaded from here. 
Note: After choosing the language and platform, the download page contains instructions in a red block.  You must download and install the download manager before you can download the CTP3 packages.

Additional support components are part of the Denali CTP 3 Feature Pack and are each downloaded separately.

Here is the link for the Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint.

SolidQ Journal–July ‘11

This month’s SolidQ Journal contains a wealth of insights and useful information, including an article from yours truly.  Click here to access the journal.

Editorial

Windows 8 and Kinect: Let’s Start Again
Fernando G. Guerrero

News & Events

Upcoming Courses

Business Intelligence

Give Us Your Data!
Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket and the Open Government Data Initiative
Miguel Lopez

Let’s Get Visual: The Art of Report Design
Paul Turley

Building an SSIS Management Framework – Part 1
Rushabh Mehta

Relational

Tuning SQL Azure Databases – Part 1
Paras Doshi

Collaboration

SharePoint Best Practices
Creating and Configuring Service Applications with and without) PowerShell – Part 1
Gilberto Zampatti

Database Administration

Pump Up with PowerShell
Herbert Albert and Gianluca Hotz