Day Two was hugely better in my opinion.

 

Designing a SharePoint Infrastructure for The Cloud “Windows Azure” —  ITP227

·         Way Way too intro, great if you didn’t know about Azure.

·         Check this out  https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=642 Learn it, know it!!!

 

Managing the Very Large Database: Best practices for administrators managing 1TB or more — DBA424

·         GREAT!!!!

·         Just did a bang up job. Went into the weeds and showed you what was going on.

·         Something I didn’t know: He spend a bit of time to explain Standard vs. enterprise edition, and made a statement, if you have a 1TB DB get enterprise. Since “he” says, Microsoft might not admit it, but it seems like the standard code is throttled. P.S. I’m sure I’m taking this out of context or didn’t remember it right, but the take away from this is to do more research on standard and enterprise.

·         To many indexes can hurt performance

·         Heaps load faster than clustered indexes

·         Index maintenance is a must and should be done regularly

·         SQL RAM guidance: 4gb per core, quad core = 16gb

·         “Quest Light Speed” http://www.quest.com/litespeed-for-sql-server/ for table level Backup and Restore

·         Lots of details into indexes and partitioning of databases. I can almost a guarantee this information will be used in the future.

·         I will do a follow-up posting with the good slides.

·         Randy THANK YOU!!!

Performance Monitoring Best Practices for SQL Server — DBA331

·         At Aspenware I do a lot of performance monitoring / testing reviews for our customers. And after this meet up, our customers are only going to get even more value for their money. I say this only because Andrew has more than 20+ years of SQL work, and it shows!!!!

·         Did lots of talking on how and where to store trace/perf mon statics. Use of a binary file a must.

·         Never load trace or perf data into tables when doing SQL performance monitoring

·         PAL – Codeplex

·         Log parser –MS

·         Relog & Logman – MS

·         Did you know?? SQL profiler will cause SQL to throttle back and may even drop events if it cannot get the information to the client. Meaning if you were to run SQL Profiler form a client computer to a SQL server and you had a slow network connection, you could actually cause the SQL server to preform worse than it would if you weren’t connected. This is also a caution to 3^rd party apps for perf mon.

·         Also went into Wait Stats vs. File Stats. Great detail and Visual.

·         Xevents to replace profiler in 2010…

·         I will do a follow-up posting with the good slides.

·         Andrew THANK YOU!!!

SQL Server Consolidation and Virtualization Recommendations and Best Practices —  DBA336

·         WOW!!

·         Biggest thing I left with was SQL in a virtual environment. May acutely become a viable option in production!!

·         Next Generation HyperV processors with SLAT (Second Level Address Translation) technology. Going to be expensive cause latest tech, but will be very much worth the investment. And as always the prices will drop..

·         The following applies to Server 2008 R2 with HyperV:

o   %Processor Time – no longer works use HyperV Logical Processor in virtual server instance

o   Can now hot swap data devices. Ex: hard drives from one server to another.

o   Microsoft has a use case that says 6 to 1. 6 physical servers to every one physical virtual host. I always said 4 physical per virtual host, cause I thought MS Virtual Server software was not in the same league as VMware ESX. But looks like the hardware and their software has improved!!

o   If your application needs more than 4 processors, virtualization is not an option, since currently only 4 processors can be assigned to any one virtual instance.

·         I will do a follow-up posting with the good slides.

·         Lindsey THANK YOU!!!

Storage Best Practices for SharePoint Server – Part 1 —  ITP248

Storage Best Practices for SharePoint Server – Part 2 — ITP255

·         Never meet just a DISK guy before. And man he knows his stuff…. I think… Don’t have anything to compare to…

·         Highlights

o   SATA-3 coming soon 6 GBits

o   Super Speed USB coming 5 GBits

§  This technology is all to drive SSD stuff hitting the market.

·         The real benefits to his talk were his slides, he did a great job, and will post them soon.

·         He also spoke about  http://www.storagepoint.com/ And I can tell you right now, I’m going to be blogging more about this so hold on!!!

·         Just a ton of information about where the SSD market is going and how it effects the enterprise.

·         Know the difference between SSD: NAND-Flash SLC or MLC

·         Fastest performance at the moment is SSD: DRAM, but if it loses power you lose all your data. So many of these drives have batteries. Batteries fail so some even have SATA drives or Spinning drives of some sort to handle backup.

·         Some really interesting stuff about TEMPDB in SQL. He recommends moving just this DB to SSD, will help overall performance of SQL server.

·         The SAN market is about to change, so if you’re about to purchase one you may hold off bit. Many companies say they will be support all SSD drives but currently no one does, mainly the HD controllers are too slow. The manufactures are rushing to resolve issue. At the moment you can only find mix scenarios Ex: SSD, SAS or SSD, SAS, SATA.

·         Also look into FCoE.