Thursday, October 31, 2013

Tales from the Query Processor: II

Hello Dear Reader!  Today is Halloween, October 31st.  My Daughter turns a big 15 today!  Happy Birthday Ches!!!!!

To celebrate two years ago I posted my first Halloween Blog.  Tales from the Query Processor.  It was a lot of fun to write a fiction/horror story revolving around SQL Server and computers.  I wanted to do this last year but got a little busy with family stuff. 

Leading up to this year, I wanted to do it again.  This is one of those stories that's been sitting in the back of my head for a while.  I hope you enjoy it!  



INTO THE DARK

“It’s the same dream every night Doctor, and I don’t know how to make it stop and it just keeps happening.”  The panic in my voice was clear.  “I’m just a simple data page, I don’t know how to stop something like this!”

“Settle down, and start from the beginning,” was the doctor’s soothing reply. 

I settled in on the doctor’s couch, take a deep breath.  I’m in a safe place, I tell myself.  I’m in the buffer far from the disk, there’s plenty of room in the cache and the LRU algorithm is fast asleep.  Nothing can get me here.

CRASH!!!!

“WHAT WAS THAT!”, I screamed as I bolted straight up.

“Settle down,” said the doctor his tone growing a bit frustrated.  “It was just a stray hash bucket.  I’m sure it was nothing.  Lie back down, that's it. You were about to tell me about your dreams.”

Another deep breath, I’m in a safe… oh the hell with relaxing, “It always begins the same…. “

I’m at home in the disk.  I’m at the bottom of the B-Tree where data pages live.  Everyone is going about their business as usual.  It seems darker than normal, but I’m the only one who notices.  The lights of Data Center cascading through the rack, the blink of packets coming and going during their commute, the hustle and bustle of page splits and re-orgs.  It’s all there.  But there’s a fog.  Like I’m the only one that can see it.  A haze in the air, and everything is in slow motion.  I move myself out of physical order, changing my pointer so I can be found and maintain logical order.

My table is large and there are many IAM pages I can hop to.  I transverse the chain trying to get a better view.  The spinning of the disk heads are in the air, their normal beat and pulse that we’ve all come to expect.  It comforts us, like a baby in the womb.  I stare out into the vastness.  Pages so far it looks like the hex starts to fall off the end of the world into nothing but darkness.  That deep darkness captures me.  I cannot look away.  It's deep like a night with no stars and no moon.  Objects just start to melt in it.  The longer I look at it the larger it grows. Instantly have a stab of panic.  I know that I should stop looking.  But I can't!

It’s out there!  It sees me!  I shouldn’t have gone looking for it!  I should have stayed where I was.  I was safe back in my allocated space.  And I'm still staring!  I want to tear my eyes away from the darkness but I can't.  It's so empty and vast.  At least I thought it was.  The hairs on my neck stand up.  I can feel it.  I'm the only one looking for it and now it can see me.

I’m to close now.  I still can’t see it, but I can feel it with a certainty.  IT IS OUT THERE.  The normal spinning of the disk feels wrong.  It feels off.  Like a 757 flying 300 feet off the ground at 500 miles per hour, the disk continues to spin.  But if you watch it, you just know that any second somethings going to happen.  And that’s when I see it.

It lights up the sky with its spark.  Everyone else is still sitting there, like it’s a picnic on a sunny day.  Be lazy, enjoy the moment.  But I know.  I KNOW.  

I shouldn’t see it.  BUT I DO.  The light caused it to be visible.  The light that was some how gone a moment ago, the vile of fog has been pierced.  Worst of all, now I know that it sees me too.  I was the only one looking for it.  I stood out on the edge, and IT SAW ME.

It’s big and malformed.  It’s hideous.  It shouldn’t be there.  I know it.  Now it must catch me and add me to it or I’ll tell everyone.

I start running.  I need to get back to my allocated position.  I’ve got 10 IAM pages to transverse to get there.  524,288 pages per allocation.  I’m running and running.  This should be taking nanoseconds, but the pages are stretching before me, more, and more, and more.  It’s taking microseconds just to transverse one page.  I can feel the ground quake behind me.  I can feel it closer to me.

I’m terrified.  Running.  This is the end and I know it.  I see my spark starting to go out in the darkness.  I know it wants my bits and it wants to re-arrange them. 

I scream and there is no sound.  I’m trying to get the Checksum’s attention.  Screaming and Screaming, but there’s no sound!  Everyone is still going about their business.  Sunday picnic’s!  Maintenance windows, Read-ahead’s from a query, none of them see it!

READ-AHEAD’S!  If I can grab onto one it can pull me up!  There’s a chance!  There’s a chance I can make it!  But the GAM Allocation stretches out even further.  I extend my hand, like that will do any good.  Reach for as far as I can.  But it’s no good.  It falls on me.

“And that’s where I wake up”

The Doctor was on the edge of his chair.  Moments ago, he would have thought this simple data page another fragmented mess just in need of a bit of re-ordering.  Unknowingly he has stopped taking notes, and his right hand is digging deep into the arm of his chair.

“What was it?”, asks the Doctor.

“Doc, you know what it was as well as I do.  I don’t want to say it.”

“No of course not,” said the doctor.  Forcibly relaxing.  “Look, dreams like this are somewhat common for data pages.  I wouldn’t worry about it.” 

“Really?”

“Yes I’m sure everything is fine.  Often times dreams are just subliminal ways of dealing with a long day.  Head on home and let’s meet again next week,” he says jotting down some notes.  “Can I see your insurance card and driver’s license one more time?  I’ve want to make sure I get all the numbers down correctly.”

“Sure,” I say handing them over.  “So next week then.”

“mmmhmmm”, mutters the Doctor and he copies down the number next to his notes.
I rise.  The doctor is right I feel a little better just getting it off my chest.  We smile shake hands and I leave the office.

I’m almost to the door when I realize my keys feel out of my pocket.  I go back to the knock on the door, it’s still cracked open.  That’s when I hear him.

The Doctor is yelling into the phone.  “What DO YOU MEAN THERE’S NO ALERTS ON THE SUSPECT_PAGES TABLE!  We need to raise some sort of alert!  They need to check the Windows Error Log! NO NO YOU FOOL, 823 & 824 DON’T APPEAR IN THE SQL ERROR LOG IT’S GOT TO BE WINDOWS!”

The other end of the phone squabbles back.  The Doctor cuts him off sharply.

“Look I know damn well CHECKSUM is not ON!  I just had a torn page in my office!  IN MY OFFICE!  CHECKSUM was enabled at some point, but it must have been disabled.” 

“Doctor, I’m a torn Page!”, I say announcing my presence at the door.

“CHECKPOINT!!” The Doctor yells into the phone, “CHECKPOINT!!!”


And the world went white.


WRAP UP

As Always Dear Reader, Thanks for stopping by.  And Happy Halloween!

Thanks,

Brad

Friday, October 18, 2013

PASS Summit 2013 Deck and Demos Live

Ready to rock some Internals.
Hello Dear Reader!  This is just a quick blog to say that my Deck and Demo's are now live for the PASS Summit 2013.  My presentation is at 9:45 am in Room 217-A.  You can get them by going to the Resource Page, or Clicking Here for the Deck or Here for the Demos.

I did something different this time that I hope you will enjoy.  Internals are great but why do they matter?  In the world of performance tuning and troubleshooting an understanding of Internals is essential.

Understanding what's going on under the hood often tells us where we need to be looking when we are problem solving.

"So Balls", you say, "You said you were doing something new?"

Thank You for keeping me on point Dear Reader!  I'll be mixing a whole list of Why Do Internals Matter with this presentation and I'd love your feedback.

Hope to see you there!  As always Thanks for stopping by!

Thanks,

Brad

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

PASS 2013 Keynotes Live Day 1

Final thoughts Dear Reader.  This is a big launch year for Microsoft and we are getting some very cool toys to play with today.  Make sure you go get the SQL 2014 CTP 2 bits.  I was telling Brent Ozar before the keynote that I thought they would extend the supported upgrade path from SQL 2005 to 2014.  I was 50/50 on that.  After the keynote I'm 90/10.

As always Thanks for stopping by!

Thanks,

Brad

9:50 am  We slice by International and Domestic, and using Power BI through the Office 365 portal we are able to use the power of Bing and get a world map breakout of calls.  Using a simple typed search you get a scatter plot.

The slicing on the fly via simple English language queries.  They look at the data by country, by platform, then they add additional countries receiving different reports by typing in a simple text box.  Just like using a search engine.

ANNOUNCING a Power BI contest that is aligned with the BACON, PASS BA Conference, coming in April.  You can vote on the winner on facebox http://www.facebook.com/microsoftbi

The winner will get a paid trip to BACON.  Who doesn't love BACON.

We review how we've pushed the boundaries.  Looks like we are wrapping up.

9:40 am We will be pulling from multiple data sets and area's.  Power Query they are pulling scrubbed user data, nice dig at Google and respecting users privacy.  Couple clicks we've gone from big data to structured data.

Now we are going to pair data and graphics with our data.  We head over to Power Query, you do an online search and you can tie that data to columns.  The data is shredded and displayed in a relational format.  Dig at Quentin's ability to do joins by the speaker.  Lot of funny banter between the two.  Population statistics are pulled in to pair up with the country, divided by population to show what the Skype calls per capita are.

They are using M behind the scenes to, for lack of a better word, power Power Query.  M is how they internally refer to the language.  It is some powerful stuff.

We we get a display of how this works on a Surface, Android Tablet, iPAD, Chrome laptop.  It just works, and it used HTML-5.  No more Silverlight.

We get a great breakout of the data calls per-capita.

9:30  am  We get a video about how the City of Barcelona is using Hadoop and Big data to manage all the city services.  Nice plug that reminds me of how IBM advertises their infrastructure services.  Nice to see a Microsoft video showing how they do the same.

Every organization has an IT need, and must be an IT organization to better handle their data and distribute services.  Interesting to see a large international city that recognizes that.

NOW for some BI!

Quentin is telling us all about Power BI, Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View, and Power Map.  Sense a trend here, you are empowered via excel.

DEMO

Very cool, looks like we will be using Skype data, 35 TB's a day are produced.

9:20 am We have a nice slide highlighting the improvements for HA/DR and how they utilize the cloud.  Next up Redefining mission critical data.

So how do we make the Cloud mission critical.  Resource Governor in the cloud using Premium Cloud Services.

Next up Big Data.  Hadoop has a lot of ways it is being integrated.  HDInsight is Microsoft Hadoop in the cloud.  Horton Works is the premier MS partner for Hadoop.  It runs on Apache, not Windows Server.

There are workloads not made for SQL Server.  Dr Dewitt did a great deep dive on Hadoop at the Summit 2011.  His keynote is online, and should be watched by any SQL Server person.  It contains the roadmap of what their team was looking at.  Hadoop tackles alot of those non-SQL Server based workloads and data sets.  In PDW v2 we have PolyBase to be able to run queries against Hadoop.

Lot of cool stuff coming with PolyBase.


9:10 am  We are getting more about hybrid DR and Availability can be used with on prem and the cloud.  Backup all versions SQL 2005 - 2014 directly to Azure storage is announced.

Natively encrypted backups for SQL 2014.  More to come on that. We also get a little more info on Managed Backup.  For shops without a full time DBA this will be a great feature.  If you're paying for a DBA managing Backups should be part of their job.

I would bet DIFF_MAP's are being monitored to trigger this.  Could be some interesting threasholds with this.  I do love good blog fodder.

Backup to Azure is being Demo.  We are walking through registering the Azure storage.  Nice thing is once you configure it, it can fire off automatically from there.

I understand that people are a little scared of the cloud.  But this is IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service using Azure Blog Storage.  Think backing up to a VM in another datacenter and the on-prem translation is easier to understand.

9:00 am Enough about the slides, let's do a DEMO!  Tracey from the SQL team comes out to do the demo.

We've got a game website for X-Box 360 games.  We see the load times when games are recommended.  We see a 10x improvement just by converting the table to an In-Memory table.  converting the natively compiled stored procedure gives us another x11 improvement.

Look ups taking almost 10 seconds are now sub-second.   We have a lookup process that runs for 26 minutes.  Using a Clustered Columnstore index we get down to less than a minute.

No need for application coding changes to use Hekaton and Clustered Columnstore.  I can't tell you how many calls and presentations I've done on those two technologies.  They are the big two for 2014 and they are going center stage.

Back to pushing the boundaries, next up Breakthroughs in availability and recovery.


8:50 am  Quentin says "Good Morning"!  He Thank's the community for the work we do to evangelize SQL Server.  There are a lot of pictures they were taking at the Pre-cons that are subject area's surrounding Cloud and Big Data.

Quentin is giving us a story about On-Premises and Cloud.  We are going to hear a lot about the merger between cloud and on-prem.  SQL 2012 CU 2 had a lot of integration, SQL 2014 takes that even further.  Nice graphic of climbing the Himalayas to signify the journey of bringing cloud and on prem together.

We will only be talking about product in GA, in preview, or that will be in GA soon.  Nice chuckle from the AZURE CAT team.

PDW V2, Power BI for Office, Power Map, SQL Server in Azure VM, HDInisght, 2012 SP1, SQL Server 2014 CTP 2.  (*There it is).

Quentin has announced that CTP 2 is the last publicly available CTP before RTM!  Next up, all about SQL 2014 and "Pushing the boundaries".  The keywords begin.

1st Up In-Memory, nice jab at Oracle. We are covering the high points of Hekaton/In-Memory OLTP.


8:40 am Amy Lewis has received the PASSION award for volunteerism.  Way to go AMY!!!  Honorable mentions are given to another nominee Ryan Adams.  Ryan does a lot of work in his local user group and the DBA performance virtual chapter.  All of the volunteers, speakers, and chapter leaders are asked to stand.  There is a myVolunteering link at the PASS website.  Bill is asking everyone to update their profile.

Quentin Clark is introduced to the stage.  We get a nice video about how SQL Server is awesome, nice community pictures, Plug for SQL Server 2014.


8:30  am     Bill Graziano is on stage making the PASS announcements.  Over 700,000 hours of free training where given this year.  The main focus will be volunteers.

Really cool video using Power BI to show the history of SQL Saturday, nice shout out to Andy Warren, Brian Knight, and Steve Jones for starting what has become a great community mainstay.



Hello Dear Reader!  It's that time of the year again, I'm sitting at the PASS Summit and I'll be live blogging the keynotes.  Read it from the bottom up!  With the 2014 CTP 2 bits already live on the web, I expect that announcement shortly!