Andrew Fryer's Blog

EcoCamp – Working from Home

2009-12-16T19:06:45Z

I took along a Microsoft RoundTable to the EcoCamp I was at over the weekend which sparked off a conversation on the value of working from home.

I had always assumed that home working was environmentally sound, because of the savings in travel. However one of the discussion group Jim Hensman at Coventry University has tried to quantify this for the university and noted that there may be higher energy usages caused by individuals heating their own homes and working in them rather than working together in an office. Some home workers at the camp reckoned their energy bills had doubled because of home working.

My thoughts after this talk were:

Few homes are air conditioned so possible extra winter costs might be offset by savings in air conditioned office space in summer, and was this taken into account.
Not all homes are empty during the whole working day so additional heating costs would only accrue while the house was actually unoccupied.

Jim himself recognised that measuring any of this is impossible as we don’t have the necessary raw data.

Clearly some types of workers can’t do this e.g. the lecturers at Coventry University have to be there to lecture to students and take tutorials. On the other side of things tools like Live Meeting and the Roundtable device (know known as the Polycom cx5000) make perfect sense in cutting down foreign travel.

Jim’s research on home working highlighted two other issues:

Home workers feel they are seen as somehow inferior / less efficient than those working at the office, by their managers.
Home workers feel isolated and detached from their work and team.

I feel the challenge is to overcome these prejudices where the environmental and economic benefits to employee and employer of home working can be established.

This is because the technology for remote or home working is easy, it’s the cultural shift that’s hard. For example at Microsoft, we have the tools in house to enable home working..

Office Communications Server keeps us in touch
LiveMeeting is a virtual meeting solution that not only works for our internal meetings , but is also used to run small (say up to 150 delegates) virtual events and demos
DirectAccess is the secure vpn without a vpn built into Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

More importantly the UK MD, Gordon Frazer, has addressed the cultural issues by simply setting out a policy which essentially means we only travel to meet customers. This is not only ensures we hit our aggressive carbon targets it means we are getting through the recession by keeping variable costs to a minimum like expenses.

Therefore as someone who rarely goes to the office:

I am valued for what I do not where I do it, and actually I get far more done when I’m at home.
I get an extra 1.5 hours a day of my life back because I’m not travelling to the office, and I can choose when to travel to avoid the rush hour when I do go in.
I save a bit more carbon because when my deliveries turn up I’m at home to receive them meaning they only make one journey.

I could go on endlessly but my point is that we need to do more remote working where it makes sense to save energy, and deal with the cultural issues, because actually this isn’t the new world of work it’s the medieval world of work where the majority of work was done locally.

Technorati Tags: ecoCamp,sustainability,green IT,rmeote working

EcoCamp

2009-12-14T12:36:55Z

The best thing about my job is the interesting people I get to meet and this weekend was no exception, because I went to an EcoCamp in Coventry and met an arctic explorer and some amazing industrial designers amongst others. You might wonder what that has got to do with my work? Well strictly nothing, but even though I work for Microsoft I am an inhabitant of earth and actually Microsoft really does care for the environment and is also at COP15 (the Copenhagen Climate change conference).

In my opinion one of the biggest problems with the environment is that most people simply don’t understand the urgency of the situation or the severity of these outcomes for each of us. So I went to this EcoCamp, not so much to speak but to listen, and one of the biggest debates was on exactly this issue.

Microsoft is trying to raise environmental awareness in a number of ways, and perhaps the most interesting evidence of this is around spatial data:

Environmental Atlas of Europe. Showing some of the issues and projects around Europe
Eye on Earth showing air and water quality across Europe for the European Environmental Agency EAA.
My good friends Mark Bloodworth & Dave Gristwood showing you Birmingham’s Intelligent City Project..

The background to these is the commitment to academic research that is needed to fully understand the inevitable rise in global temperatures, on the planet and human society, such as this research by Microsoft Research Cambridge on Computational Ecology and Environmental Science.

I realise this can all sound like gloom and doom, but the individuals and organisations and even countries that adapt now will be the ones that are best equipped to survive these changes.

Finally thanks to the EcoCamp organisers for a very informative event

Technorati Tags: EcoCamp,sustainability,COP15,European Environmental Agency

PowerPivot 101 – an Introduction

2009-12-10T10:44:33Z

If you showed a business analyst or finance guy how to manipulate a whole year’s worth of data in Excel they’ll probably buy you lunch. PowerPivot for Excel does just that, but before you cash in, you need to be aware of how it works its magic and understand why it compliments rather than replaces your existing investment in business intelligence.

First of all having this power in Excel can be seen as a two edged sword..

On the one hand it is very fast and easy too use, even on a standard laptop (with 2Gb+ RAM). Users just see a pivot table although there are also some slick add-ins to this functionality in Excel 2010.
But could lead the user to create their own BI on a desktop, and this type of spreadsheet has been the exact problem that business intelligence is designed to solve not make worse!

However PowerPivot functionality is also built into SharePoint 2010, enabling the designer of the PowerPivot to share his work with his colleagues, by posting it to a special PowerPivot gallery...

What’s clever about this is that they can quickly slice and dice the PowerPivot but in a browser…

PowerPivot has other really useful features..

The underlying data can be refreshed from the original sources to keep them up to date on a user defined schedule.
It integrates well into Office so users don’t need to learn that many new skills. It also integrates really well with Reporting Services so you can still provide report users with a view of PowerPivot data.
There are monitoring tools in SharePoint which show the resources the PowerPivots are using..

a management screen showing PowerPivot Report Usage

However it is not the total cure for all BI ..

It doesn’t scale that well nor is it intended to. It’s designed for tactical ad hoc BI in a team or small department. So PowerPivots can be considered as sand boxes (and are referred to as such under the covers in SharePoint) which are designed to be quickly thrown together to meet a particular need.
Most Business Intelligence burn a lot of time addressing data quality issues and PowerPivot only consumes data so you’ll still need to address this.

I see PowerPivot as a way of letting the business concentrate on the analysis and presentation of data, in order to meet an immediate need. This leaves the technical team to concentrate on providing good clean data, and to incorporate some of this tactical work in PowerPivot into new & existing enterprise/strategic BI projects as appropriate.

To learn more about PowerPivot, simply go to it’s own special site..

http://www.powerpivot.com/

SQL Server scalability?

2009-12-09T08:27:56Z

Is SQL Server is only as good as the operating system – discuss

The ability of SQL Server to make use of underlying hardware is often held up by the operating system, or to put it another way, pretty much as soon as there is support for some new thing the SQL Server team have a version that uses it. If we go back to SQL Server 2000 , then it wasn’t too long after windows could run on intel’s shiny new itanium processor that SQL could too, and it was the same for the subsequent generations of AMD & Intel x64 CPUs.

Windows Server 2008 R2 can now support 256 cores (the previous limit was 64), and hot on the heels of that is SQL Server 2008 R2 which can also do that. There isn’t too much hardware out there yet that even breaks the 64 core limit, but I did find a man who has such a rig, Henk van der Valk from Unisys. He runs a query from hell on it against a SQL Server 2008 R2 database on a 96 core Unisys E7000, just to see how fast he can do stuff!

I was impressed so I grabbed the film crew and made a quick five minute video on TechNet Edge which you can watch here.

BTW Henk has worked on a lot of the performance tests on SQL Server such as the ETL World record and this guide on tuning Integration Services.

My parting thought – How big does the server have to be before the perception that SQL Server doesn’t scale finally dies out?

Technorati Tags: sql server 2008 r2,windows server 2008 r2,96 cores,unisys,henk van der valk

Brown IT

2009-12-08T11:04:26Z

Green IT is about saving power in offices and data centres, so my definition of brown IT is about making the best use of the existing kit you have. This is good for two reasons, it saves you money as you don’t have to buy new hardware, and it saves vital resources.

You will see loads of stuff telling how energy efficient all the latest laptops and servers are but the materials need to make a 2Kg laptop weigh in at over 1200Kg the chief culprits being the chips and circuit boards. Another way to look at this that only a quarter of the power used by a laptop is used while it is running, the other three quarters are used to make it, and this doesn’t consider the cost of disposal. So the environmental benefits of replacing hardware less often outweigh the power savings by upgrading to the latest gear.

This is why I would say Windows 7 is better for the planet, either you can repurpose old kit to run it as is or perform a modest upgrade.

Of course upgrading the software can be hard, and in my village they don’t have software assurance with it’s shiny desktop optimisation pack, they don’t have Windows Deployment Services , they haven’t got System Center etc. they’ve got me!

I used to dread doing this sort of thing because consumer PCs are just so varied,possibly reflecting their owners! But it is all just so much less hard work than it used to be with XP - you may not remember how much fun that was to upgrade from Windows 95/98/SE, but I do!

A good recent example is my neighbour Chris. He’s got an old Dell running XP with an after fit Hauppage TV tuner, web cam, an old HP printer etc, This all just quietly upgraded to Windows 7 while we had a glass of wine and tried to play Beatles Rock Band. Of course he’s got to reinstall all his software, but actually that’s a great opportunity to have a good old clear out, and apart from a copy of Office, most of his software is bought online. He’s kept the keys and passwords for these other applications (which is essential for disaster recovery) so he just pulled down the latest version of each one and he was all set.

So if you didn’t feel like holding a Windows 7 launch party, maybe you could keep yourself in beer and nibbles over the festive season by hawking your upgrade expertise in your neighbourhood, it certainly works for me!

Technorati Tags: Windows 7,sustainability

SQL Server 2008 R2 Master Data Services (MDS)

2009-12-04T07:54:19Z

A Business Intelligence project can often run into the sand because of data quality issues and tools like PowerPivot and Reporting Services will only highlight these problems back to the business,. These quality issues aren’t simply about keying errors they relate to the reference data that is stored in multiple places in many systems.

An obvious example is the many versions of a customer that exist across these systems e.g. the marketing system have an address where they send out the catalogue, but this is different to the billing address in the finance system. However while this may well need to be fixed, it isn’t killing the business in that bills are being paid by customers even if the odd catalogue is being mis-mailed.

Anyway my point is that this reference data exists in several systems, and fixing this in the data warehouse is OK for reporting but doesn’t resolve issues that can occur in production. Also this kind of problem is a business process issue, rather than being of a technical nature. Having said that technology can certainly help and this is where Master Data Services in SQL Server 2008 R2 comes in.

The new release will provide a portal where end users can manage this reference data..

At this point I would like to hand off to a real expert on the subject, Donald Farmer who I interviewed at SQL Bits a couple of weeks ago. I’ve put the video on TechNet Edge so over to you Donald..

If you want to know more, there is also part of the main SQL Server site dedicated to Master Data Services and when I found where all the sessions of SQL Bits have been posted to I will also let you know.

Technorati Tags: SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP2,Stratature,Master Data Services

Report Builder 3.0 Shared Report Parts

2009-12-02T08:04:31Z

Report Builder 2 in SQL Server 2008 allows for some collaboration on report design between the business user and the IT professional, but this is limited to a working on a whole report. A possible scenario would be that the IT guy would create a data source and a query (dataset) and then hand this over to the business user (btw Microsoft call these people information workers) to complete and maybe this user would then come back to you for problem resolution or because they need more fields on their report and they don’t have the skills to do that.

Report Builder 3.0 in SQL Server 2008 R2 , improves on this by providing options to share parts of a report such as the tables and matrices (aka tablix in SQL Server 2008 onwards), charts and the graphics that give reports a corporate look and feel.

You can then consume these from a report part gallery..

..which hides behind the properties tab on the right hand side of Report Builder 3.

Up until now in Reporting Services we’ve only had the option to have shared data sources. Anew thing we can now do for our users is to provide them with shared data sets which are shared differently to the other report parts, possibly because it is something we would do as the IT Professional. My two key reasons to look at these would be..

1. You the IT guy can get the query exactly right for a set of reports and then share it with those business users as easily as creating a normal data set form a shared data source

2. You can cache the data sets on an ad hoc or scheduled basis

If any of this is of interest I have a step by step guide on this for you to follow you’ll need the SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP. Alternatively you can put your feet up for 7 minutes and watch me show you how to this in a screencast on TechNet Edge!

Technorati Tags: SQL Server 2008 R2,Reporting Services,Report Parts,Report Builder 3

Report Builder 3.0 SparkLines

2009-11-27T18:01:00Z

As a graphic designer and geek with a masters around cognitive psychology I am intrigued at how little use is made of the wonderful visualisations in many modern BI tools be they from Microsoft, Oracle IBM or SAP.

Ignoring this trend, I wanted to show a new visualisation tool in SQL Server 2008 R2 called SparkLines during my session on Report Builder 3 at SQL Bits, but my shuttle was having disk issues and I hadn’t fully got everything back before I was on (but thanks to Darren Green, Chris Testa- O’Neill and Rob Farley for trying).

Anyway my demos are back in business and here’s a SparkLine report I created earlier..

SparkLines being the mini graphics which you can also do in excel. BTW I have used various sub-types in the report above to show what you can do, but you would obviously stick to one in a report like this.

I have put created a walkthrough and samples that you can follow so please have a go (it should only need half an hour at the very most).

Technorati Tags: Sparklines,SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP2,Report Builder 3

Reporting on spatial data in SQL Server 2008 R2

2009-11-27T10:47:00Z

Report Builder 3 the latest version of the end user reporting tool in SQL Server 2008 R2 has built in support for Bing Maps and you can try this for yourself in the November CTP.

To help you along I have posted a 9 minute screencast to TechNet Edge and published a step by step guide here. BTW don’t worry if you haven’t got any spatial data to hand as I have included guidance on how to get some.

My example simply shows the attendance at a few SQL Server events in the UK that I have been to..

..and is actually very straightforward. So an easy way to impress your boss or users in the many organisations that are becoming interested in understanding where things are happening.

Addendum 27th November.

I have just found out that you don't need to license Bing Maps if you you use Reporting Services as I have done here, i.e. for either aerial or the road view. However you would have to have a license if you used Bing Maps in any other way outside of reporting services for business use.

You can access the license agreement for Bing Maps through the map control when you add the Bing Maps layer on a report

SQL Server 2008 R2 image preparation

2009-11-25T08:08:28Z

With the rise of the virtual machine, the quick creation of a sandbox in which developers and testers can work without fear of compromising the production environment becomes a much simpler exercise. You will see built in support for this lab management in the ultimate edition of Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) through the use of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

One of the problems posed by these sorts of operations is that while it is easy to make a copy of a machine , be it physical or virtual, it’s a bit more difficult to change its identity. While you can quickly change the name of a machine you need to sysprep it to change it’s unique Security Identifier (SID). SID’s are how active directory identifies individual machines so you can’t have two on the same domain even if they have different names.

This gets more annoying when you include SQL Server in the mix. If you rename a machine that’s running SQL Server or sysprep it, it will upset the SQL Server permissions service accounts etc. There are workarounds for this but they are tricky and not supported.

However If you use the advanced installation options in

SQL Server 2008 R2 ..

.. you can prepare an image of SQL Server which will survive a sysprep and subsequent domain join. One you have done that you can come back to this interface and complete the install. That’s a very manual process so what’s useful is to script all of that. I have a separate step by step cook book to show you how to do this.

I have also posted a video on TechNetEdge so you can watch me do it (I have compressed down the installation so it only lasts 10 minutes).

The real power of this process comes into its own when you use it with a deployment technology such as Windows Deployment Services (WDS), System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) or SCVMM as both of these allow you to run scripts as part of the deployment process, thus fully automating it. This is a topic in it’s own right which I will cover later.

To summarise SQL Server 2008 R2 is now sysprep friendly and you can try this out by downloading the November CTP

SQL Server MVPs

2009-11-18T19:34:00Z

The best thing about working with SQL Server is working with the other people that use it. The SQL server experts who do most for their colleagues in the community are recognised as MVPs, so not only do they know their stuff they are willing to share their knowledge.

Of course you could argue that all this furthers their careers and/or businesses and while this might be true up to a point I would counter this by suggesting that you buy SQL Server MVP Deep Dives

For two simple reasons, it’s an excellent example of what MVP’s are capable of producing, and because they have donated all their royalties to the WarChild Charity

Thanks to Kimberley , Paul R, Paul N , Rob, Kalen, Greg and Adam for this. and thanks to Richard Siddaway in the UK for the PowerShell chapter and for letting me know the background.

Technorati Tags: MVP,SQL Server,War Child

A small problem with Managed Service Accounts

2009-11-17T07:51:46Z

I am very fortunate to always have the latest versions of Microsoft stuff to play with such as SQL Server 2008 R2, but occasionally something doesn’t work, and so I need to tell the relevant product team what the problem is.

In this case I was trying to get the SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP to run with the new Managed Service Accounts in Windows Server 2008 R2 Active Directory. They are a bit like the NTAUTHORITY/LocalService account in that they don’t have passwords that you need to specify to the service, however they are a totally different beast in that they are domain accounts designed to be used for services, like IIS 7.5. Essentially the passwords are managed internally by active directory and are designed for use with Kerberos. For more on this have a look at this article on TechNet

However they are so new there is no way you can create one without using PowerShell (with the active directory module loaded)..

New-ADServiceAccount SQLService

Then you tell AD where you want to use the account on the server SQL08R2Demo..

Add-ADComputerServiceAccount -Identity SQL08R2DEMO -ServiceAccount SQLService

finally you deploy it to the computer that will use it

Install-ADServiceAccount -Identity SQLService

Now you can see this account in Active Directory under the new managed service account folder..

I can now use an account like this to run IIS by going to services and running IIS with the new account (note you don’t supply a password for this account).

However when Iu try and use it to run a SQL Server service, it doesn’t show up in the SQL Server configuration tool as it doesn’t see this kind of account at all even though you can search the managed service accounts folder. Of course if I go into services proper I can change SQL Server services to use it…

but that is not supported, as it will foul up the permissions needed to do things like backup. BTW I didn’t supply the dollar sign suffix

so I have found something wrong and now I need to tell someone to fix it and the place where you do that for Microsoft stuff , irrespective of whether or not you work for them is on Connect (http://www.connect.microsoft.com).

You register suggestions and bugs by first searching to see if it’s there already and then you can create your own..

Here’s that bug, and notice that no one’s voted on it yet. Votes are primarily there to influence feature requests, but bear in mind that what you or I consider to be a bug, maybe there by design and so could in fact really be a feature request. Anyway the more votes there are coupled with the severity of the problem the more likely it will be fixed

So if you think something needs to be changed then use the site as the product teams are pretty good but are not known for their telepathic abilities.

In the meantime I hope that this gets fixed for the release of SQL Server 2008 R2.

Technorati Tags: Connect,Microsoft bug reporting,managed service accounts,active directory,windows server 2008 R2,SQL Server 2008 R2

SQL Bits Friday session

2009-11-16T14:50:15Z

I promise this is the last time I mention SQL Bits this week, but I wanted to let you know I have got 25 free tickets for the paid for event this Friday which would normally cost £149 to attend.

The venue is the Celtic Manor in Newport…

and is probably the next best thing to going to TechEd. There are four tracks;

Data warehousing,
Database,
BI,
Development,

specifically on SQL Server 2008 and R2, with an all star cast headed by Donald Farmer, and Thomas Kejser, the details of which are here.

If you can make the date and want to come please e-mail me (afryer@microsoft.com) with SQLBits in the title and I’ll get the tickets to the first 25 to respond.

Technorati Tags: SQL Bits,SQL Server 2008 R2,SQL Server 2008

TechEd 09 Ask the Experts

2009-11-16T10:53:00Z

I have been at TechEd Berlin last week and when I wasn’t speaking I spent most of the time in the Learning Centre (TLC) or ask the experts. I must confess I felt a bit of a non-expert this year for two reasons;

I have been spending time getting up to speed on the new Windows releases
There were some real experts on the stand..

In the snap below we have Bob Beachemin from SQL Skills, Gopal Ashok and Torsten Grabs from the SQL product team in Redmond. Gopal is mr Replication and HA, while Torsten is mr StreamInsight.

Joanne is also from Redmond while Roger is from Microsoft in Switzerland. On other days we had Omri Bahat (DBEngine), Michael Rys (XML and Spatial) and Donald Farmer (BI and specifically PowerPivot).

AJF 17/11/2009 I forgot to mention the other product superstar on the stand, Chris Baldwin who is Reporting Services.

So going to TechEd isn’t just about going to sessions it’s an opportunity to share experiences with the guys who develop the product as well as having time to do a few labs..

However it’s a tough world out there and so getting your manager to agree to letting you go was hard (however 7,300 managed it this year), so the next best thing if you’re interested in SQL Server is SQL Bits this Thursday – Saturday.

Donald farmer is presenting at this event on the Friday, and in addition there will be a whole crop of MVP’s there and actually these guys have more influence with the product team than I do.

The Saturday community day is free, while the Friday is a paid for event focusing on SQL Server 2008 and R2. Either of these would be my top tip if you need to be looking for your next career move, as the contacts you meet like the MVP’s are often aware of vacancies through the projects they are engaged on.

So I’ll hopefully see you in Cardiff!

Technorati Tags: TechEd Europe 2009,SQLBits,SQL Server 2008

Wir fahr'n fahr'n fahr'n auf der Autobahn

2009-11-07T15:27:40Z

James and I are on our way to TechEd Berlin, but we’re driving because we’re both a little bit eccentric. Not only that we have a bit of stuff to take..

four laptops, a shuttle, a hub assorted drives, cables so that we can demo a bunch of interesting stuff in our session.

We’ll be showing as many of the following as we can cram in 75 minutes:

Our SQL Server on Server Core (but not supported) cookbook
Using the advanced installation options in SQL Server 2008 R2 to prepare a virtual machine which can be quickly bought on line
Live Migration in Hyper-V2 to move a SQL Server virtual machine from Wallace-R2 to Grommit-R2, the 2 laptops in the picture above.
Managing these virtual machines in the latest version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).
Using the enterprise policy management framework from codeplex to ensure all the SQL Servers above are configured the way we want them.

All of this will be done from the command line / powershell, and the only thing we can’t share with you is our internal iSCSI target software which so you’ll need something like StarWind or iSCSI Cake.

If you’re going to be there then the session is DAT01-IS on Monday afternoon, but if not then James and I will be making a series of 5-10 minute videos from each demo, when we get back as IS sessions aren’t recorded.

Technorati Tags: SQL Server 2008R2,Windows Server 2008R2,sysprep,scvmm