Whether you want your cloud solution from a search provider, a bookstore or a software house there is no denying that the next wave in the IT revolution is the cloud. Does that mean that IT professionals will go the way of the thatcher, millwright and blacksmith to be consigned to OU courses on social history. Is it some developer/management led conspiracy to remove what is seen as an obstacle to change in some organisations, or simply a way of cutting costs?
My assertion is this is not the case for several reasons.
- Our roles will be different. When I started in tech support we used excel to track ip addresses because dhcp wasn’t a service we had, indeed we had to install tcp-ip software on windows because it wasn’t included in 3.11! However despite all the advances in networking we still have network guys, why because that increased functionality means that more is possible, and there is more to go wrong!
- Another point is that we still have users, and even in a totally connected world they will make mistakes, or have trouble getting their work done, so I don’t see an end to the helpdesk although we could argue about where this will be done in future.
- Like me the UK needs more fibre to make it healthy, only in the UK it’s not bran that’s needed it’s fast broadband; fast enough for unified comms, video streaming and distributed transactions. Until that day we will be running a mixed economy of on premise and off premise services, and that means good IT Pro’s to seamlessly integrate this and keep it all running.
- Even if we do live in a permanently connected world I suspect some systems will always be kept in house because of concerns around performance, control and security, or just general inertia
So am I thinking about retraining to learn to be an electrician, or ramping up my guitar skills? No I am staying with SQL Server (including SQL Azure in the cloud), as I believe the demand for dba skills will continue long after I am in the ground.
Although today is European safer internet day, I did my training yesterday to 650 secondary school pupils, as I have an event today in TVP as part of the day job.
There was stunned silence after they watched the excellent videos provided by CEOP (Child Online Protection Centre) , which are also available to teachers and parents on the ThinkUKnow website. CEOP are also providing both a Toolbar and Search add-ins for IE8 to make it easier to report abuse and raise awareness of the issues:
This is useful as not all sites commonly accessed by children have the report abuse icon that CEOP use, Facebook being an obvious example.
I heard on the way in that the Today team on radio 4, were stating that there were only 169 cases of grooming bought before the CPS, and were therefore downplaying the initiative a bit. So why do I bother with this?
- 169 is 169 too many
- The reporting rates for this kind of crime are very low, i.e. only a few people come forward.
- Grooming is only one kind of problem on the internet which can adversely affect children, and so I also emphasise the damage that cyber bullying can do and that they need to be really careful with the photos they take of themselves and their friends. And as you can see there’s quite a few other topics as well.
OK rant over, back to preparation for today’s event on the Microsoft Application Platform in 2 hours and counting!
I hope my PowerPivot posts and videos are proving useful, and continuing this them I want to cover off installation.
PowerPivot for Excel is a free download for Excel 2010 and simply doesn’t need any edition of SQL Server behind it. It comes in 32 bit and 64 bit depending on which variant of Excel you have installed and you can get it the beta of this from the http://www.powerpivot.com site.
However to deploy that PowerPivot to SharePoint 2010, you’ll need to do quite a bit of work. Rather than rewrite these I will simply direct you to the set of draft setup guides on the PowerPivotGeek blog.
The basic setup is to..
- Install but not to configure SharePoint 2010
- Install SQL Server 2008 R2 analysis services using the analysis services integrated option…
- and then complete the post configuration guides to setup the PowerPivot gallery in SharePoint. The oddest one of these that I found I had to do was to make sure that the profile for the SharePoint service account had the fact that SharePoint is in the intranet zone!
I have used the first option, a single server setup to produce my PowerPivot videos and posts. However my demo rig is a bit more complicated in that I have three virtual machines (vms) on my shuttle (BINKY) which has 4 cores 8Gb RAM and 2 x NICs which are setup as follows:
- a Windows Server 2008 R2 domain controller so I can use domain accounts for all the services. This has 768Mb RAM and 1 x logical processor. I do this because I use the DC for all my demos and because it’s closer to the real world.
- a client virtual machine that is domain joined. This has 2gb RAM and 1 x logical processor. It is running Excel 2010 with the PowerPivot add-in on Windows 7 x86 as well as the SharePoint designer, and the SQL Server client tools.
- The SharePoint vm is running Windows server 2008R2 x64 with 4.5gb RAM and 4 x logical processors. which is way below the recommended production specification of 64Gb, but performs OK for single client access against a couple of PowerPivots. This VM also has Reporting Services installed in SharePoint integrated mode so I can show the interoperability of Reporting Services and PowerPivot. BTW There is also an install guide for this on the PowerPivotGeek blog.
It’s a miserable Friday out there so why not persuade the boss for a bit of R&D time and set this up this afternoon.
One of the confusing things about SQL Server is all the editions it comes in and one of the great things about SQL Server is er… all the editions it comes in.
Recent additions to this edition sprawl are the SQL Server DataCenter edition, the SQL Server Parallel data warehouse and SQL Azure. Why is this annoying and why is this good for you?
The annoying bit first…
Which edition should I use is a common question, and here I want to use the analogy of pizza. Go into any restaurant and they will have a list of the different pizzas on the menu based on their experience and feedback from their customers. But surely at the end of the day we are talking about cheese on toast here so how hard can it be? True but each customer is a little bit different and may have allergies and other dietary constraints and preferences.
SQL Server works like this the editions are named for what they are used for web edition for the web, workgroup edition for workgroup , enterprise edition and so on. These have the mix of features in them that make them fit for purpose like compression, resource governor and all the BI stuff in enterprise edition.
Of course you could adopt the “make your own pizza” approach that some other some vendors go for which is to give the basics at a given price and then charge for every single add on that you might want like compression clustering, support etc. but this can get quite difficult to manage across a suite of servers to say nothing of the higher costs this usually entails.
The good stuff..
is the ability to run SQL server on anything from an embedded application on a device, to a small PC, all the way up to data centres and the cloud. This is a good thing for developers because the same application will just work on any of these without a rewrite, and dbas can use the same set of tools to manage any of these and replicate data across them if need be.
The point is that new editions have recently appeared in R2 to reflect new hardware and the cloud, but you don’t need to do anything radical to use them except install or subscribe, the rest you’ll be familiar with.
I often get asked about what I do in Microsoft, especially if my title of evangelist comes up in conversation. The latest addition to our team Sara Allison was also curious about what her colleagues get up to, so she interviewed me …
BTW Sara is our producer, so she’ll be doing all the cool creative web based stuff and has just started to blog on MSDN.
I am not sure if Mrs Fryer is trying to cash in on the life insurance or hasn’t quite got the hang of supply chain management. The thing is I keep seeing stuff in the fridge with “sell by October 2009”, and the odd bit of furry cheese.
Of course software doesn’t normally expire in the way that food does, but there are exceptions in the form of trial versions and beta products.
Windows 7 RC is probably the most downloaded beta to date and it is about to start to expire. This shouldn’t matter too much as it was only meant for evaluating the new operating system and helping Microsoft to test its reliability. However the reality is that many users still have it installed and this may well be on their only machine.
The way the RC will behave is as follows:
- 15th Feb it will remind you to upgrade after every reboot
- 1st March it will reboot every 2 hours, giving some access to do an upgrade and get data of their machines
- 1st June it will go into ‘notification state’ to tell you copy of Windows is not genuine e.g. your wallpaper will be set to black and there will be popups appearing at random intervals.
I mentioned upgrade above because if these people were unhappy with Windows 7 they would have reverted to what they had before. I suspect the continuing use of RC is partly a testament to how reliable it was (for a beta) and how good Windows 7 is. However the RC does have a few quirks in it, it is not supported nor will updates be released in future to secure it and should be consigned to the recycle bin as soon as possible, even if it was possible to go on using it forever.
So can I ask you to do two things:
- If your organisation is now looking to upgrade to Windows 7 then you can now use an evaluation copy of rtm here.
- Check around friends family and colleagues to ensure that they have plans in place to move of the RC before it starts making their lives difficult.
Full details of this are on the KB article on Windows RC expiry
If I was writing a bill of rights for the internet my main focus would be to make the web a safe and fun place for everyone, but that’s not going to happen so instead I spend some of my spare time trying to help children be safe on line (a sort of digital green cross man). Because this entails meeting the children I have had to get the relevant criminal records checks done via the Child Exploitation Online Protection (CEOP) centre and receive their excellent training.
It’s also important to educate parents about the threats the internet can pose. While we have some really good guidance on how to lock down a child’s PC and XBox to make them safer, increasingly they’ll be surfing from a phone and of course there are other connected gaming platforms like the wii and Playstation, so the focus must be on awareness and process rather than some magic bit of technology.
So there is Safer Internet Day on 9th Feb were volunteers from O2, Visa and Microsoft will be descending on schools in the UK to spread the message not only to children but to parents as well. However we can’t be everywhere so there is also an opportunity for the parents education to be streamed to schools throughout the day so if your school want to get in on this please contact me and I’ll set it up.
In my recent post on the license changes in SQL Server 2008 R2, I deliberately didn’t cover the way the new features would be distributed across the various editions as at the time of writing the decisions simply hadn’t been made.
One of these new features is StreamInsight (the feature formerly known as Complex Event Processing) and I haven’t posted too much about it to date because I didn’t see it being a mainstream tool.
Before I go into that what exactly is StreamInsight?
Imagine you’ve just woken up this morning and all these annoying inputs are entering your brain:
- There’s a really loud noise intermittent noise (the alarm’s gone off)
- some odd smells abound (from last night’s left over curry)
- There’s no light at all
- Your stomach is also reminding you that you over did it last night.
- Your blood sugar level needs attention.
Your body needs to react to all of this in the right way and often very quickly rather than simply remembering that this has all happened. If your body was running StreamInsight then you could set up a few rules to start your day:
- You would realise your eyes were shut and respond to this by opening them.
- A separate background check would be monitoring the rolling average blood sugar level over a minute interval and re-evaluating that every 10 seconds in order to release insulin into your bloodstream to manage that.
- You would reach out to shut off the alarm now you can see it
- You would leg it to the bathroom!
So StreamInsight is a near real time monitoring and control framework able to respond to thousands of events a second. It does this by running in memory and it has the optional capability to write out what’s happened to database i.e. SQL Server.
It will have several applications from traditional manufacturing or environmental process monitoring and control, to biomedical applications and event stock market analysis.
StreamInsight is a development framework so there is nothing to see until you start to program in it, and one of the other reasons I have mentioned to much about before was that it was originally only going to be in the new DataCenter edition of SQL Server.
However it will be included in a limited form in standard edition, the limitation being a restriction on throughput rather than capability so code written for one edition will work on them all. This restriction will typically result in standard and enterprise editions being limited to about 5,000 events a second with greater than 5 second latency while DataCenter edition will be able to handle over triple this amount and have a far lower latency.
If that’s sounds interesting there a whole site on StreamInsight here and there are some sample apps on the StreamInsight blog here and you can download the November CTP of it here.
The people we employ to run the country have decided to make a lot of the data they collect on our behalf freely available at Data.gov.uk. This data by itself is of limited use, however when combined with in house data in a business or academic institution and plotted on to a map then it becomes quite powerful.
And that power can be good or bad. If you are trying to sell your house on line and I notice that car theft and muggings in your area are twice as high as the national average that might influence my decision to purchase. On the other hand this lets the buyer know more about the are they are moving into e.g. quality of schools healthcare etc.
Fortunately there’s no personal data on there, but the data is in quite a lot of different formats and this site is just a collection of URLs to the various agencies and NGO’s that have the source data, some of which want to give you a pdf document!
These data sets typically don’t have geospatial coordinates in them them but there are some reference data sets which do have this and keys to such things as local authority boundaries. So to get your own solution working you’ll have to find out which one to use to join to the data sets you want to plot and compare.
It is a start and there is a forum capability where you can post questions and make suggestions, and there’s also a developer section to support and encourage applications around the data.
All I need now is a quiet moment to explore it in a bit more details and have a go!
I am a pretty good cook (not as good as our chef in residence Marc) but I don’t practice enough so I wanted to get back up to speed to help out while my wife works on her OU degree and to explain PowerPivot.
I have posted this video on YouTube..
..and you can click on the yellow buttons on it to view each of the screen casts (there’s a back button on each screen cast as well) on each topic I have made.
Hopefully you’ll find this useful and as ever comments are welcome.
The most important thing about PowerPivot is the ability to share users analysis into SharePoint so that these other users can slice and data form within a browser. As I’ve said before this uses SQL Server analysis services behind the scenes, albeit as part of a special install option. I’ve also said that PowerPivots on SharePoint are not anywhere near as scalable as conventional analysis services, and so the usage has to be carefully monitored to make best use of the facility. This monitoring is built into the PowerPivot functionality in SharePoint 2010 via a dedicated dashboard.
The other clever thing about this installation is the ability to schedule refreshes of the PowerPivots from their source data thus keeping them up to date without any intervention.
I have another screen cast of it on TechNet Edge here.
PowerPivot is essentially a way of making an analysis services cube using excel as the design tool. When you use the PowerPivot for Excel add-in, then there no backend dependency, but if you want to save a PowerPivot to SharePoint 2010, there has to be a special installation of SQL Server 2008 R2 analysis services associated with the SharePoint farm.
This integrated installation might seem like the way Reporting Services can also be configured to work with SharePoint, however when analysis services is installed in this way it can’t be used as a repository for traditional cubes. So you can’t use management studio to manage this new environment it all has to be done through SharePoint. Nor can you deploy (build or restore) ‘normal’ cubes to this instance form scripts or the BI Dev studio.
However a good test that your PowerPivot environment is running properly is to post a PowerPivot to SharePoint ..
Now open the PowerPivot you just saved
and copy it’s URL..
Now open SQL Server Management Studio and connect to an analysis services database..
and paste the in that URL to the PowerPivot..
and the PowerPivot looks like any other cube. However the advice here is to look but don’t touch. So apart from testing the only other thing I can think of that you might want to do is to script out the data source view or schema. The use case for this would be to quick start the design of a traditional analysis service database, because the PowerPivot has moved form being a tactical solution to a strategic one.
Another thing to not about the connection string is that it can also be used in Reporting Services or anything that can consume analysis services data to make the PowerPivot a data source e.g. you can write and run a report against a PowerPivot..
I have a short video on sharing PowerPivot Data here and there is a complete site dedicated to PowerPivot http://PowerPivot.com
One of the key problems in BI is getting your data together and cleaning it, and one of the best tools for doing this at scale would be integration services in SQL Server. However integration services is too complicated for the average business user but these users do need something to load and prepare data. They are used to doing this in excel and so this is exactly what they use in PowerPivot for excel.
There are two parts to the process, extraction and transformation. PowerPivot provides simple wizards to get data from a variety of sources, in fact anything that can be connected to. New sources include SQL Azure, and Data Feeds in Reporting Services and I have a short screen cast on this here (on TechNet Edge).
Having grabbed all the data each table ends up in its own tab. The most important step to create relationships between them, where they are not automatically picked up form the sources by PowerPivot. The data in each one can be added to, by having extra columns (but NOT rows) using special excel like formula (Data Analysis eXpressions – DAX) to do lookups across the tabs. I have another screen cast on this here.
If you want to know more, there are also various demos, and videos on www.powerpivot.com
Why are people in this country so glued to the imperial system of measurement? are they easier to use compared to metric (SI) units? e.g.
- How many cubic inches/ pints quarts does the engine in your car have?
- How heavy is a gallon of water?
- How many cubic yards of gravel do I need for my drive if its 90ft long 10ft wide and I want the gravel to be 4 inches deep?
SI units are designed to work together from the ground up and use a common set of prefixes to denote scale e.g. kilo, micro, centi etc., so calculations involving multiple units (like force and acceleration) are much easier as are day to day areas and volumes.
The same sort of odd inertia seems to exist in isolated pockets as I found out at the conference I was at last week, only this time it is the reluctance to adopt the new office ribbon, and it’s almost like the people I was talking to were fixed in the idea that they didn’t like it and were then looking for reasons not to.
When Office 2007 was developed something had to give. The menu structures were getting so long that navigating them become more and more difficult to the point where 8-% of the feature requests for excel 2007 were actually in the product already but you couldn’t easily find them. So what they decided to do was to attack the problem in several ways:
- Put everything related to a particular task, e.g. insert into one place in its own
- Show the common things up all the time and the less common would appear in context. A good example is if I have focus on a picture I can then see an extra set of tools specifically for pictures.
- Let you preview what you are going to do as you do it.
Office 2010 builds on this, but also harks back to earlier versions of office in that you get the file button back, which now brings up backstage where you can:
- Do stuff with the whole document like save, share etc.
- Configure whichever office tool you are in
- Change the office ribbon if you need to
One other thing I couldn’t field at the event was how you could get toolbars to float in Office 2003. You can’t do that anymore but you do have right click so if I select something in Office 2010 e.g a textbox in PowerPoint and right click
I can not only set its properties , I can also use the mini-toolbar (next to the orange arrow) to directly set what I am working on.
Microsoft isn’t giving up on the ribbon and is actually expanding its use to OneNote, Outlook, Project and Visio and SharePoint 2010, but it has made changes to it make it even easier to use. You could take my word for it or you could download the current beta and try it yourself.
My parting shot is that at the BETT 2010 event I had about twenty questions about the release date of Office 2010 (some time before June 2010) so clearly some people out there like it. Anyway that’s done so now I am off for a quick 0.568261484567444 litre!
I have spent the last four days on the Microsoft stand at a huge education show (BETT 2010) to field technical questions on Windows 7 and Office 2010. I take my hat off to the IT Pro’s working in schools as they have to cope with all kinds of applications and hardware and usually there are only one or two per school.
But don’t take my word for it here are some of the more unusual conversations I had:
- Will Pagemaker 5 run on windows 7 as I want to upgrade form windows 3.11? (no idea !)
- Can I save my document in DAISY format? Daisy is an open accessibility format allowing documents to be zoomed in and narrated as audio (like talking books) , and the add-on for this can be found here
- What happened to Producer so I could make a video of my PowerPoint presentation?. This is now built into PowerPoint 2010 (go to backstage i.e. file-> share)..
- Where did Moviemaker go in Windows 7 – it’s now a live program and you can download live maker here
In future these guys will be opening up their networks to pupils’ laptops and of course there is the 20% turnover in every school every year as pupils form the senior year leave and new ones arrive in the junior year.
Fortunately there are quite a few things to make life a little easier for them , probably the most important being live@edu, which is free Microsoft hosted e-mail and collaboration for pupils and students, so that the IT staff in a school only have to worry about e-mail for the staff.
Other resources for schools in the UK are on the Microsoft education portal, and the education team’s blog including part 1 and part 2 of ICT Money Saving tips, which was a standing room only talk on the Microsoft stand at BETT.
