Viral has made another video for my Christmas series, this time on Windows Live Sync, which allows you to aggregate and share your digital life..
and sorry it’s a little late!
The remaining videos in my quest to show 12 cool free things that you can use form Microsoft have been made by good friend Viral. Viral is the Office and Sharepoint evangelist so it is entirely appropriate that he shows you PPTPlex, a PowerPoint add-in to pimp your presentations.
It really comes into its own if you have to give a more unstructured presentation or tutorial, and you can get from the OfficeLabs site here.
The OfficeLabs guys have been busy in the run up to Christmas and have release a gizmo called Thumbtack. It’s a sort of web based OneNote and allows you to quickly aggregate research from lots of web sites. My wife Juliet explains it better than me…
I can see this being used by lots of kids for homework (hopefully not wholesale plagiarism), and by the rest of us for such things as comparative shopping.
Properly indexing databases is generally seen as a good thing, and is one of the top causes of poor performance. However when we get home from a hard days SQL we seem to forget all of this and our home lives are less well organised, especially our photographs.
In my latest Christmas video, my wife Juliet shows you how to tag your photographs using Live Photo Gallery ..
Juliet also wanted to mention that a lot of telemetry from your photos gets stored in the image (date, camera settings), automatically by a digital camera, so you just need to add the who and what, if you have one of those.
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tagging,
photography
I still love to watch the Royal Institute Lectures at Christmas, and I am please to see Microsoft supporting them this year. In this spirit I wanted to show the Microsoft World Wide Telescope so if you haven’t tried it yet hopefully this will convince you…
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astronomy,
telescopeOn a serious note, this is a very demonstrable example of Software + Services that Microsoft keeps banging on about, in this case the client does all of the rendering and caching while the service provides the rest including the up to date imagery, search, and repository of the guided tours.
Deep Zoom actually does what it says on the tin. However while many people have seen demos of it I am not sure many have actually tried it or know how it works and that it’s free.
To rectify that Viral Tarpara (he’s the good looking one in the shot below) explains all in this short tour..
I love PC Gaming, so I haven’t got an XBox 360 yet. However there’s no denying its popularity and unlike other games consoles Microsoft have released a simple toolkit , the XNA Game Studio to enable anyone to write a game for the XBox/PC/Zune.
In today’s video Kevin Pfister takes us through this free toolset..
This blog is written using Windows Live Writer as are many of the others on TechNet and MSDN. In this video Giorgio Sardo shows how he writes his and how to control your PC with a Samsung Omnia..
Although Photosynth has been widely publicised in the general and IT press I still come across load of people who don’t know what it is. In this short video James O’Neill in fine Blue Peter tradition shows a synth (the buzz word for what you make in Photosynth) he made earlier of Brighton Pavilion..
Hopefully this will inspire you to have a go with that new camera you got for Christmas
I hope you like the card (a result of a miss spent youth at Art College) and are enjoying your well earned break.
My 12 days of Christmas this year will take a look at what sort of free stuff you can download from Microsoft, some of which you may already know but maybe not all of them. The series are all short videos which are intended as a bit of fun. So without further ado here’s James O’Neill talking to me about Vulcans…
It’s Christmas Eve and the last day of my virtual advent calendar on SQL Server 2008..
Hopefully the last 23 posts have given you some idea of what’s in SQL Server 2008 so I thought it might be useful to conclude with a word on upgrade. Firstly SQL Server 2008 has a lot in common with SQL server 2005 so if that’s where you are then upgrade is pretty painless and straightforward.
Don’t panic if your still on SQL Server 2000, you can upgrade straight to SQL Server 2008, and there is a massive amount of support to help you. Probably the best place to start is the SQL Server 2008 Technical Reference Guide. This covers all aspects of the SQL Server (DBEngine, Reporting Services, Analysis Services and Data Transformation Services/Integration Services) and provides a very detailed (490 pages) of help to ensure upgrade is painless as possible.
There’s also more help on TechNet and a tool to discover where your servers are:
So take the next few days to read over the guide so you can get started on your upgrade next week, unless that is, you have other plans tomorrow!
Day 23 of my virtual advent calendar, about stuff I like in SQL Server 2008..
Filestream isn’t one of the new data types in SQL Server 2008 it a variant of varbinary(MAX), and it is Microsoft’s solution to the problem of storing large unstructured data as part of a database.
In SQL Server 2005/8 varbinary(max) can store a file of up to 2Gb (a limitation inherited by SharePoint) and as this limit is approached the performance of streaming this data back to a client becomes worse and worse. On the other hand referential integrity is easy to maintain and backups disaster recovery is straightforward as all that’s needed is to restore the database.
The other common approach to this problem is to have a table with pointers to the file locations of the documents on disk. This is quite hard to write and implement and referential integrity and backup are also difficult as it’s important to have the right file at the end of each pointer and not to loose any on the way. However it does have the advantage of performance over internal storage of the data in the database.
Filestream is the best of both worlds. Documents are stored as files on disk, but they are in a special SQL Server filegroup. When a request for a file is made SQL resolves this into a filehandle that can be use by ordinary win32api’s so performance is as good as it can be. However because all of this is in a filegroup backup is also straightforward. This mechanism also respects transactions so if you rollback you get back to the previous version of the file. A word of warning here is that this can involve some serious disk usage if the files are large as internally SQL Server keeps the older version of the file =until the transaction is committed.
Using Filestream is a developer task , so any example I put here will be littered with very dodgy C#. Rather than do that I will instead point you to this excellent example developed by one of my French (it is in English) colleagues Patrick Guimonet, and it also shows Powershell integration in action!
Finally Filestream is included in all editions of SQL Server while not being part of size limitations in these editions.
Day 22 of my virtual advent calendar, about stuff I like in SQL Server 2008..
SQL Server 2008 now has data types to store points lines and polygons in 2 spatial data type, Geometry and Geography. I have already posted quite extensively on spatial data, but it is is one of my favourite new things in SQL Server so all I am going to do here is point you at my blogcasts:
There are also some excellent developer resources on spatial data and virtual earth from Mike Ormond, and Johannes Kebeck.
Finally all of this is in all editions of SQL Server 2008, including the free Express editions.
Day 18 of my virtual advent calendar, about stuff I like in SQL Server 2008..
Consolidation has become synonymous with virtualization, but even hardcore VMWare addicts and VMWare themselves advise that databases are one of the last targets of a virtualisation strategy. Nonetheless SQL Server 2008 is being increasingly virtualised and for those interested in this this whitepaper from SQL CAT (Customer Advisory Team) is essential reading especially if you are using Hyper-V.
But what if you don’t see virtualisation as the right answer for consolidation what else you can you do? Traditionally SQL Server has been split up into instances for 2 reasons
1. To guarantee resources to the instance using memory and processor affinity
2. To comply with various arbitrary practices in some third part applications particularly around security.
However for point 1 you might also want to consider Resource Governor (which is only in Enterprise Edition) which fixes resources for groups of users but only affects other non critical groups when the server is under pressure. I have a good screencast of how resource governor works...
Day 20 of my virtual advent calendar, about stuff I like in SQL Server 2008..
The accidental DBA is a DBA who ends up looking after SQL Server as part of a number of other duties e.g. Exchange admin, developer etc. This often occurs because SQL Server can survive pretty well despite long periods of neglect, but then suddenly something goes wrong and then someone gets nominated to look after it post fix.
As databases grow in complexity and size they do eventually need some attention, and some tasks can be bit daunting if you not immersed in SQL Server every day. There are excellent add on tools from the likes of Idera, Quest and Redgate to ease the management burden, but SQL Server 2008 itself has a few things to help with this:
- Powershell (which I have posted about here) gives a common scripting language for the Microsoft platform.
- Policy Based Management works a bit like group policy in active directory to put a range of SQL Server into a set state. I have already made a short screencast of this…
- Data Collection which I covered yesterday
- Central Management Servers, Are simply a special registered server which adds to the power of registered servers that we are used to using by allowing T_SQL or the Policies I just mentioned to be fired at multiple servers. The central management server is also a good candidate for your data collection management data warehouse. I have screencast on this too, although when I did it the feature was called configuration servers..
A lot of this stuff (Policy Management, Central Management Servers, Powershell) will work against SQL Server 2000/2005 so all you need to do get started is to have one instance of SQL Server 2008 as a base (for the Central Management Server) or just the client tools for the rest.
