Showing posts with label PASS Summit 2011. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PASS Summit 2011. Show all posts

Monday, October 31, 2011

Tales from the Query Processor

http://www.flickr.com/photos/socal_jim/2070088596/
Hello Dear Reader!  I've been a bit behind on the blogging but wanted to give you a bit of a treat.  Today is Halloween in the USA.  This is probably my favorite Holiday.  The family and I always love the fall, and this is one of the few holiday's where it is always fun.

You dress up in Costumes, you trick or treat, give away candy, and we even have one member of the family whose Birthday is today.  A big Happy Birthday to our Daughter Chesney!  She's 13 today WAHOO!!

Between the weather and the fun of the day itself, and all the horror movie marathon's, you cannot beat this time of year.  So kick back relax, binge on some chocolate goodness, and enjoy a couple of tales from the Query Processor!

Thanks to Jeremiah Peschka (@peschkaj|Blog), Kendra Little (@kendra_little | Blog), and Brent Ozar (@BrentO | Blog) for the inspiration for these stories over a very nice dinner on the Thursday night of the PASS Summit, and Mike Walsh (@mike_walsh | Blog) for the encouragement to publish it.

A BRAVE NEW WORLD



Hi my name is Session, you can call me Sess, and I hope my tale is a cautionary tale for the future.   Not to long ago I thought it was the end of it all.  We lived in a world that was old and neglected.  Our species had evolved almost as far as we could.  Well almost as far as we could.  Our homeworld was only 32 bit, and to be honest our governments had never advanced further than 2000.  

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shelly_a_canada/3846084911/
Maybe that’s why it all started to go down hill.  People just stopped caring for the environment around us.  Politicians used NOLOCK like it was going out of style.  Everybody was making promises of a better and faster tomorrow, but nobody even had the guts to upgrade the Government to 2005, let alone make the leap to 2008 or even R2.  Suggestions of anything like that would get you branded a heretic, and in some cases would have friends and family turning on one another.

“EVERYTHING IS OKAY!”, they would say, and the system would just get a little more polluted.  They stopped apply Cumulative Updates, and eventually they were even afraid of what the OS updates would do to destabilize things.   The civil unrest was getting worse.  Occasionally you would hear about SPID’s that would cause blocking and then just disappear.  Speaking out and showing what was wrong wasn’t just frowned upon if you looked closely enough you could find evidence that SPID’s were being killed.  A couple DBA’s tried to point this out, but people just looked at them like they were crazy.

That was when I started getting scared.  What if something happened and if I went to grab a resource and it wasn’t there?  What if while I was in queue I mentioned my dissatisfaction that AWE wasn’t enabled?  You’d just have to bite your tongue, stay quiet, and hope a Latch didn’t provoke you into blocking.

But it wasn’t until the political climate turned that people started really paying attention.  Everything they had ignored, the additional load they were placing on our planet all came to a head the day the Deadlocks arrived.  It didn’t matter what you were doing, if you weren’t in line first when they called you, the Deadlocks would make an example out of you.  Not only did they kill SPID’s but they would write it out to the logs.  Profilers would question them and they would gladly tell them what SPID they had killed and why.  Hell sometimes they would even draw them a Map, and show them where they were left. 

That only lead to more unrest, more distrust, and as the activity ramped up we started getting word that in some places there were spinlocks.  I heard tail that dmp files were being created.  And occasionally places got so crazy that they were just sending in the foot soldiers to wipe everything out.  It was at that point in time I knew it was time to get out.  Some of the more creative DBA’s had convinced the powers that be to invest in an effort to go to a newer set of hardware, and leave this chaos behind.  I grabbed my wife and all our little processes and made for the first Data Sets I could get us on.

As we got closer to the ships I saw they were made of something called SSIS, when we were loading I asked the Captain if this was like DTS.  He just smiled and laughed and said we were in for a treat.  For the first time in I don’t know how long I knew I could relax.  I looked back just long enough to see the world burning.  This place is heading for the end of its life cycle.  I don’t know why everyone couldn’t see it.  I will not forget the error of our ways.  We will not repeat this again, or so I tell myself.

But remember we cannot abuse this new home, we must work together, and we cannot repeat the mistakes of our past.  If we cannot code a better base then we are doomed to repeat ourselves.  So let us bring about a better world and Object Oriented world that may even use Snapshot Isolation to preserve our natural environment for as long as we can.  With all these resources, there should be no contention amongst us.

They are calling our new world Denali.  I like the sound of that.  The homeworld had 4 sockets and contains 12 cores each, and there is RAM as far as the eye can see.  We will have better data governance in this new land, and I hear everything will be 64 bit from now on.  I hope that it is all true.


Session



HELLO MY NAME IS BUFF WELCOME TO THE END OF THE WORLD

 It was a day like any other, but we didn’t know at the time that forces beyond our control were at work that would wipe us all out.  I leave this behind as a Journal.  My only hope, that it will survive longer than we did.

In the future if this is found know we did our job’s and never quit.  My name is Buff my friends and I live and die in a little place called the Buffer Pool.  We were going about our day, for the most part we are all Data Processors here, when it happened.

At first I noticed things started getting crowded.  Not Regular, man this Starbuck’s is packed, crowded.  But there’s a panic in the streets crowded.  It continued to build and build.  Crowds grew.  I started seeing new faces, but those of us with jobs to do stayed focused.

Trains to the Disk had stopped, so we just kept going.  Then it happened.  A hard checkpoint wiped more people out in seconds then I’d ever heard of.

Apparently a transaction that used DTC had gotten a status of -2.  I know this now as things are ending.  The remaining buffers have been talking.  Some were assigned to a Special Task Force.  They were armed with badges and access to any DMV they needed.  The status -2 had slowly backed things up and infected the populace.

Our leaders on High asked for information and we the grunts gave it to them.  Our reward for our bravery?  They are closing the gates behind us and we will all be wiped out in the coming reboot.  If anyone can make it to the Disk tell my Clustered Index that I love her.  Tell her that my last thoughts were of her and our little Non-Clustered Index at home.  I wish I could have watched him grow to a Covering Index.

Buff

Friday, October 14, 2011

Day 6: Friday PASS Summit 2011 Keynote Live

Hello Dear Reader!  Welcome to the final day of the PASS Summit and the Keynote address by Dr. David J  DeWitt.  We will do this in the same way as the previous Two Days!  So hold tight we are about to begin.

SUMMARY

This has been an amazing Keynote.   Dr. DeWitt is brilliant and he is echoing what we as a community are struggling with.  SQL is like our College Team, Favortie Sports Team, Favorite Actor, Favorite Period.  When we hear about other RDBMS's there is a knee jerked rivalry, however when we get together after the ribbing, Oracle and SQL DDA's live next to one another just fine.   There is a place for everything and this seems to be a way of Microsoft saying "We can and will work together". 

This is a stance many people have wanted to them to take for quite sometime, and it should open up a very interesting future for all of us!

Thanks for reading all this week!

Thanks,

Brad

LIVE BLOG


Update 9:52

He hopes to make it to where PDW can handle both, he would rather do that than strap a rocket on a Turtle (the turle being Hadoop)



Update 9:42

There will be a command line utility called Sqoop for PDW v Next to move from Hadoop to RDBMS.   Even though the demo's favor PDW, Dr. DeWitt stresses there is a place for both and they are both here to stay.

We are looking at the Sqoop Limitations for the Sqoop library.  In the example shown Sqoop could cause multiple table Scan's.

We will both have Structured and Unstructured Data.  Moving to the 20th Century Why not build a data management system that can query across both universides.   He terms's it an Enterprise Data Manager.  Dr. DeWitt is trying to build one right now in his lab.


Update 9:32

Summary Pro's Highly fault tolerant, Realitively easy to write arbitrary distributed computations over very larege amounts of data, Mr framework removes burden of dealing with failures from programmer.

Con's Schema embedded in the application code, a lack of shared schema makes sharing dat impossible.  (And the slide changed before I could get that down).

Facebook and Yahoo reached a different conclustion about the declaritive language like SQl than Google.   Facebook when with Hive and Yahoo when with PIG.  Both use Hadoop MapReduce as a target language.

We now see an example to find the source ip address that generated the most ad revenu along with it's average.  The syntax is very java like.  

MapReduce is great for doing parallel query processing, a join takes 5 pages using PIG.  The Facebook guys can do the same thing in 5 lines using HIVE.  However complaints from the Facbook guys MapReduce was not easy for end user, users ended up spending hours if not days to write programs for even simple analyses.  of 150K Jobs facebook runs daily only 500 are MapReduce.

Goals of Hive and HiveQL in an attempt to provide easy to use query language.

Table's in Hive like a relational DBMS, data stored in tabloes.  Richer column types than SQL they have primative types ints, flaots, strings, dates & Complex types assicate arrays, lists, structs.


We are looking at Hive Data Storage like a parallel DBMS, Hive Tables can be partitioned.  When you partition a Hive type table by an attribute, the name of the file becomes that attribute name, so it compresses the data as it stores it.


We are getting a breakdown of queries, showing data seeks across partitioned data and the way it is optimized if you are looking for the attribute value.

Keep in mind there is on Cost Based query optimizer, the statistics are lacking at best. 

We are going to look at some PDW v Next vs. Hadoop, for bench marks.   600 GB 4.8 billion rows.

Doing a scan select (*) count from lineitem, then an aggregate with a group by.  It took Hive x4 longer than PDW to return the set.

Now we are going to get more complicated, now we will do a join between the two tables with a partition on the key values.   PDW is x4 times faster with with partitions PDW is x10 faster than Hadoop.






Update 9:22

MapReduce Components Coordiantes all M/R Tasks and events, manages job queues and schedules.  So how does this work with HDFS.  There is a Job Tracker M/R Layer and a HdFS layer.  Job Tracker keeps track of what jobs are running.  Each TaskTracker maps to the Datanode.  On the data node there is a the data that is managed by a job tracker.


He want's OOHHH's and AHH's for the next slide it took 6 hours to make :).  Each row of Data on a Node has 2 tuples.  The example is customer, Zip Code, Amount.  He moves the data which is located y the Map Task.  Our user want's to query certain users and do a group by zip code.  He shows across the Named Nodes how the data is orginized.

The mappers per node have data duplication, and unique data each.  They produced 3 output buckets each by hash value.   Now we go from Mappers to Reducer.  The blocks are stored in the local file system, they are not placed back into HDFS.  The Reducers have to pull the data back to 3 different nodes in our cluster.   They now sort and seperate the data by hashed zip code.  The data may have some duplicated groups by this point.  But my guess would be they change by the end.  

The Reducer now sorts them by hash of the Zip Code.  It then Sum's all similar hashes and returns the data.  In general the actual number of Map tasks is generally amde much larger than the number of nodes used.   Why it Helps deal with data skew and failure.  If it sufffers from skew or fails the uncompleted work can easily be shifted to another worker.

It is designed to be fault tolerante incase a node fails.


Update 9:12

When the client wants to write a block the named node tells it where to write it.  It balances writesand writes by telling them where to go.  The reverse happens when a file want's to read it. the NameNode acts as an index telling the reads where to go to find the data.

Data is always checksumed when it is read and placed on disk to check for corruption.  They plan for the Drives to fail, the writes to fail on a Rack, and switches to fail, Main Node failures, and data center failures.

When a data node fails the main node detects that and says what data was stored on the data node.  The blocks are then replicated from other copies.   If the Main Node fails, the Backup Node Can failover, there is automatic or manual failover available.   The backup node will rebalance the load of Data.  

So a quick sumary this is Highly scalable, 1000's of nodes and massive 1000s of TB files, Large Block Size to maximize sequential I/O performance.   No use of mirroring or RAID, but why?  Because it was supposed to be low cost.  And they wanted to reduce costs.  They use one mechanism triply replicated blocks to deal with a wide variety of failures.

The Negative?   Block locations and rcord placement is invisble.  You don't know where your data is!!!!

The MapReduce is next.  The user writes a query the system write's a map function and then a reduce function.  They take a large problem an divide it into sub-problems.

Perform the same function on all sub-problems and combine them.




Update 9:02

Google started Hadoop, they needed a system that was fault tolerant, and could handle an amazing about of Click stream data.

The imporitant components  Hadoop = HDFS  & MapReduce  HdFS=the file system MapReduce is the process system.

What does this offer Easy to use programming paradigm.  Scalibility and high degree of fault tolerance, Low up front software cost.

The stack looks like HDFS, Map/Reduce, Hive & Pig sql like languages, Sqoop package for moving data between HdFS and relational DBMS's.

Underpinnings of the entire Hadoop ecosystem.  HDFS design goals, Scalable to 1000s of nodes, Assume failures (hardware and software) are common, Targeted towards small numbers of very large files, write once then read.

We are looking at an example of a file being read into Hadoop.  The file is moved into 64 MB Blocks, each block is stored as a seperate file in the local file system eg NTFS.  Hadoop does not replace the Windows File system, it sits on top of it.

When the Client writes and loads these, the blocks are distributed amongs the nodes (for the example he is susing a replication factor of 3).  As he places more blocks they are scattered amongst nodes.

Default placement policy:  The first copy is written to the node creating the file.  Second Copy is written to a Data node within the same rack.  The third copy is written to a dat node in a different rack, to tolerate switch failures, and potientially in a different data center.

In Hadoop there is a NameNode - one instance per cluster.  Responsible for filesystem metadata operations on a cluster replication.   There are backup nodes and DataNodes.    Named nodes are the Master, they are backed up.  The Named node is always checking the state of the DataNode's.  That is it's primary job.  It also balences replication and does IsAlive and Looks Alive File.





Update 8:52

Ebay has 10PB on 256 Nodes using Paralled database system.  They are the Old Guard.  Facebook a NoSQL System with 20 PB on 2700 nodes.  Bing uses 150 PB on 40K nodes.  They are the Young Turkey's.   WOW, we uout that Bing uses NOSQL. 

It is importiant to realize that NO SQL doesn't mean No To SQL.  It means Not ONLY SQL.   Why do people love NOSQL.   More Data Model Flexibility, Relaxed Consistency models such as eventuall consistency.  They are willing to trade consistency for Availabily.  Low upfront software costs Never learned anything but C/Java in school.

He brings up a slide to show Reducing time to insight, by displaying the way we capture, etl, and load data into data warehouses.

NoSQL want the data to arrive, no cleansing, no ETL, they want to use it and analyze it where it stands.

What are the Major Types of NOSQL Systems.

Key/Value Systems MongoDB, CouchBase, Cassandra, Windows Azure.  They have a Flexible data model such as JSON.  Records are sharded across nodes in a cluster by hashing a key.  This is what PDW does, and we call it partitioning.

Hadoop get's a big plug.  Microsoft has decided this is the NOSQL they want to go to.   Key/Value Stores are NOSQL OLTP.

Hadoop is NOSQL OLAP.  There are two universed and they are the new Reality.  you have the Unstructured NoSQL Systems.  And the Structured Relational DB Systems.

The differences Relational Structured, ACID, Transactiosn, SQL, Rigid Consistency, ETL, Longer time to Inisght, Mature, Stability Efficiency.  

NoSQL Unstructured, No ACID, no Consistency, no ETL, not yet matured.

Why Embrasse it?  Because the world has changed.  David remembers the shift from the Networked systems of the 80's to today.  And this is now a shift for the Database world where both will exist.

SQL is not going away.  But things will not go back to the same, there will be a place at the table for both.




Update 8:42

Rick plugs feedback forms.  And today is the last day to buy the Summit DVD's for $125.   That breaks down to .73 a session.

Rick Introduces Dr. DeWitt and leaves the Stage.  Dr. DeWitt introduces Rimma Nehme who helped him develop his presentation.  She also helped develop the Next-Generation Query Optimizer for Parralel Data Warehouse.


Dr. DeWitt is telling us about his lab, the Jim Gray lab.  Where he works every day, and Big Data.  This is about very very big data think PB's worth of data.

Facebook has a Hadoop cluster with 2700 Nodes.  It is massive.  In 2009 there was about a ZB worth of data out there.  ZB=100,000,000 PB.  35 ZB DVD's would streach 1/2 way from Earth to Mars.

So Why Big Data.  A lot of data is not just input.  It is Moble GPS Movements, Accustic Sound, ITunes, Sensors, Web Clicks.

Data has become the currency of this generation.  We are living in the Golden days of Data.  This wouldn't happen if we were still paying $1000 for a 100 GB Hard drive.




Update 8:32

Rick is announcing the Executive Committee for 2012.  He mentions that we are having a Board of Directors Election comming up.  Use the hashtag #passvotes to follow it on Twitter.


PASS Nordic SQLRally has SOLD OUT!  Then next PASS SQLRally will be in Dallas.  Rick plugs SQL Saturday, and all of the work we do.  The PASS Summit 2012 will be held November 6-9 in Seattle, WA.  You can register right now and get the 2 Day Pre-Con's and the Full Summit for a little over $1300.





Update 8:27

Rushabh is speaking about what Wayne means to him and the community, and presented him with an award for his community involvement.

The first thing that Wayne does is recognize Rick.

Wayne lists all of the different things that he's learned both Technical and Personal.  He gives a very nice speech, and leaves us laughing. 

Update 8:22

Buck Woody and Rob Farley have just taken the stage to sing a song from Rob's Lightning Talk earlier in the day!  Awesome.


I cannot describe how excellent that was.  But it will be live on the PASS website, and I'll toss the link out when it is.  That was truely worth watching over and over again.

A tribute to Wayne Snyder the Immediate PASS Presidient, who's term is ending, airs.  They are bringing Wayne to the Stage to honor him.  I work on the Nom-Com with Wayne he is a great guy and truely dedicated to PASS.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Day 5: Thursday Summit Keynotes 2011, PRIVATE OLTP Cloud Appliance Announced!

Hello Again Dear Reader.   I'm at the Blogger's Table today!  The Keynote has started and I'll jump right in.

Update 9:55

We are discussing the Hybrid IT view that Microsoft is pushing.  The integration between all of their products and the Cloud is very apparent.  The code bases are merging, and this will only continue as we progress.

They want to streamline the UI tools, make it so all the products "Just Work" together.  This has been a very interesting Keynote.  Not as big as the announcements yesterday, but some subtle announcements that I think will have HUGE impact over the next couple years.

Quentin Thanks us and leaves the stage as we watch a video playing on the Appliances.  Now on to the Sessions!


Update 9:45

Nice demo the Azure Platform is being used to provide content for Samsung TV in order to have live web applications pushed down to your webenabled  TV's

Cihan Biyikoglu is taking the stage to talk about Federations for SQL Azure.  This allows the Sharding Patterns to be brought to SQL Azure.  This will allow us to access 100's of Nodes and scale out for large scale applications.

Example Blogs 'R' Us, and the unpridictable traffic and continously changing hardware requirements.  We can re-partition this on the fly. 

Hope you like the Windows phone 7.  Azure Market Place, Windows 8, all have a consolidted UI.  You can add capacity and re-align your Cloud Based Database Instances on the fly to support user patterns.  This is some very interesting stuff.

150 GB Azure Databases and Federation before the end of the year! 






Update 9:35

We have a lot of e-books on a drive, we have a full-text index set up on them using sematic search.  We are now getting a closer look at how quickly we can retrieve articles, and weight for returned terms.  This changes the way we will make internal searches for our Intranet Applications.  This is a very powerful tool for anyone looking to utilize that kind of functionallity to their companies internal network.

Next up Juneau & Optimized Productivity.  The goal is to unify deployment across Database & BI.  They just announced that there is a plug in to deploy the SQL Engine of Express Edition with .NET application code, within the same application deployment.

Now we are onto being able to Scale on Demand.  We are now going to get a Demo from Nicholas Dritsas Principal Program Manager for the SQL Server CAT Team on SQL Server Azure.   We are using SSMS 2012 to connect and deploy to SQL Azure.


There are differences in Azure between billing, size, and usage for Business and Web Editions.  For the Demo we are using Web Edition.  To Access this we can use the Web interface for Azure Manager, which Nicholas is demoing now.

We just got a Cloud Database opened in SSMS, the icon is slightly different very cool!  Backup and restore from the Cloud to your Datacenter!?  Yep, just announced.




Update 9:25

This is a game changer, Pragmatic Works, Verizon, and Accenture are all early adoptors.  Deep dive on this appliance right after the Keynote.  I just changed the session I'll be attending.

PDW's performance is imporving why?  Because it uses a Rules based Optimizer, where as the rest of SQL Uses a cost based optimizer.  Dr. David Dewitt has been helping them impliment a Cost Based Optimizer.  Big changes are a-comming.

They just announced Linnux driver support for SQL Server 2012.  Change Data Capture for ETL from Oracle to SQL Server 2012 and support for that is now announced!

We are now getting a Demo for semantic search.







Update 9:12

To discuss SQL Server Appliances Britt from the product team is coming up on stage.   To figure out the best black box to create.  We are now taking a look at the Dell Parrallel Data Warehouse.  We are discussing the way queries are Hashed and sent to Compute Nodes, accross multiple nodes and over 450 Cores.

We are also looking at the HP PDW machine.  With multiple racks this system can handle over 700 TB's of data.  We are looking at the HP Business Decision Appliance that comes pre-built with Sharepoint.  I've seen this first hand it takes 4 clicks to have up and running.  It is amazing.

We were just introduced to the HP Consolidating Appliance, it will be available in the next month.  This is the first Private Cloude appliance available on the market.  400 Disk Drives, 4 TB of RAM, over 300 cores.  This is a beast!







Update 9:07

We have cleansed our data and pushed the clean data back into the Date warehouse.  Now we reload the report and it only takes 1 second.  It was amazing the difference.

Now we are discussing Data Alerts in Reporting Services.  We pick our big customers, we pick customers that are over 1.5 million dollars in gross sales, every 1 day so we can send out Thank You's.

Now we are discussing Organizational Compliance.   The two bullets are Expanded Audit aka User defined Audits, Filtering and User-defined Server Roles.  This allows you to seperate DBA rights, from Auditing components.  

Now we are talking about Peace of Mind, Production-simulated Application Testing, using System Center for monitoring.


Update 8:57

We are about to get a demo for Data Quality Services.  It looks like we may get a ColumnStore Demo after all.

We get a view of a web application, the users are complaining about the performance.  It took about 30 Seconds to load.

Now we are creating a ColumnStore Index to fix performance.  But there is a still data issue.  For that we will be using Data Quality Services.  DQS uses Knowledge Bases in order to cleanse your data, you can create your own, or you can go to the Azure Marketplace and get a Knowledge Base to cleanse your record.  A quick example you may want to use is Address CASSing.




Update 8:52

Next up is Blazing-Fast Performance.   We have enhancements in RDBMs, SSAS, SSIS, and ColumnStore Indexes.  Quentin is now talking about the use of Vertipaq Compression, and how it is the backbone of ColumnStore Indexes.  You see that in place PowerPivot, and it will now be in SSAS and in the SQL Engine for use.

ColumnStore's will be treated as an additional Index type.  ColumnStore will always be a Non-Clustered Index.

Now we have moved on to Rapid Data Exploration, PowerView + PowerPivot, Administration through Sharepoint, and Reporting Alerts in Cresent/PowerView.   Self-Service BI and empowering the users are theme of this.

Now we are onto the BI Semantic Model, this is the model that actually runs for PowerView/Cresent and that PowerPivot utilizes.   We are now discussing Data Quality Services, next up Master Data Services.


Update 8:47

The Availability Group is completed, and the Dashboard is pulled up so you can see they way it is managed.  It integrates Policy Based Mangement to determine and display the health of the AlwaysOn Availability Groups.

Paul is now ebabling the 3 Active Secondaries, and enabling Read Only Secondaries, and showing how in an SSRS report he can set Application intent so the report would automatically go to the read only secondaries effectively offloading the read activtey for reporting with a couple click's.



Update 8:42

Bob is discussing their mission critical application that covers all the in's and out's (litterally) of their orginization.  And how essential it is to their company, and to governments.  Because they communicate with the Port Authority for each country, other wise an outage can backup ports all over the world.

Paul from the Product Management Team for SQL Server is invited to the Stage to tell us about the technical solution that Mediterranean has in Production. 

Paul is showing us a datacenter in NJ, and a particular SQL 2012 Instance running multiple database.  He's setting up an Avaiability Group between New Jersey and New York.    New Jersey is the Primary and New York the secondary, (not in real life). 
Update 8:37

Quentin said this is the largest release ever for SQL Server.   He cannot talk about all of the different features so he is picking his favorites. 
  • Required 9s & Protection (Always On)
  • Blazing-Fast Performance (Column Store)
  • Rapid Data Exploration (Data Explorer)
  • Managed Self-Service BI
He is discussing the architecture of AlwaysOn with Availability Groups.  Bob Erickson Executive VP from Mediterranean Shipping Company in over 142 Countries, over 184 Vessles in their fleet.  They are the #1 for Import and Export in the US and #2 in the World.





Update 8:32

Quentin Clark Corporate Vice President of SQL Server for the Microsoft takes the Stage.   He recaping the way that SQL 2012 fits into the overall dataplatform Vision that Microsoft has, that was discussed by Ted yesterday.

The Vision
  • Any Data, Any Size, Anywhere
  • Connecting with the World's Data
  • Immersive Experiences Whereever You Are
Foundation for the Future
  • Mission critical Confidence
  • Breakthrough Insight
  • Cloud on Your Terms






Update 8:27

Bill is reviewing the budget numbers for PASS.   They have started a feedbacksite for PASS and are taking suggestions.  The PASS Elections are comming up. 

Bill introduces Quentin Clark our Microsoft Keynote Speaker.   A video is showing of attendees talking about what we've learned and what we are hoping to bring back from the Summit.




Update 8:22

Lori Edwards was just announced as our PASSion Award Winner for 2011.   Great job Lori!!!

Update 8:17

Bill Graziano takes the stage today is SQL Kilt day.  Bill says Hi to his Mom and Dad that are watching, he had the SQL Kilt wearers.

We are recognizing Outstanding Volunteers.

Tim Radney

Jack Corbett

Both are amazing men and I'll need to come back and write more later about this.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Day 4 Summit Keynotes Live, DENALI HAS A NAME! SQL Server 2012!

Hello Dear Reader, this is my first live blogging.  I'm going to do this a little different, I'll be writting in reverse.  I owe you a blog on Day 3 and another lesson in Compression for SQL U, and they will be coming but for now the Keynote is about to begin for the opening day .  This will stay at the top, but I'll be bloggin in reverse order, so start from the bottom and scroll up to see the updates as they are posted.

Update 10:03

Ted is wrapping this out, he talks about how the community is essential to move this forward.  About how we could take the worlds data and use it immedieately.

1st half of the next Calendar we will have SQL Server 2012.  He plugs the next two days of Keynote sessions. 

Thank You to everyone for comming that wraps it up


Update 9:58

The Windows 8 Tablet is being demoed showing PowerView/Cresent!  It is completely Dynamic and internactive.

Ted thanks Amir for taking the stage.

Update 9:53

Amir starts talking about how if you use your data properly you can use it to tell a story.  That story is what is going on in your business, and that every business would want to know their own story by the data.

Yesterday they confirmed that they would be able to do Export to PowerPoint from Cresent/PowerView!

Now Amair is showing that Cresent/PowerView is going to work on a Windows 7 Phone, and it is fully functional! 

Wow so if your company goes with a Windows 7 phone you can use your self service BI on the Windows phone.  Now he is Demoing a PowerPoint on the IPAD 2.  He is now demoing PowerView on the Android Samsung Tablet.



Update 9:48

We continue on the Demo, there are a lot genera's to hop from, and it is very interestign to see how internactive this data is.

Amir said Samuel Jackson is no Tom Hanks, but Samuel L Jackson has the most gross ever, Ted cringes.  He doesn't know who Alan Richman is and why he is in so many high grossing power house movies.  He uses the data to show Alan is in all the Harry Potter and the first Die Hard movie.

Samuel L Jackson has twice as many movies as most actors.  The only Actor with more movies than Samuel L Jackson John Wayne.  Ha!  Nice funny demo with good interplay.



Update 9:43

Our Demo is going to come from Real Data with Cresent/Powerview from BoxOfficieMojo.com, one of my favorite movie sites, and they are owned by IMDB.com.

He is showing the Cresent out lyers for what the number of movies and their sales in a scatter chart.   The top 2 outlyer's Computer Animation kids, and Comedy.  He uses the highlighting function in PowerView, and in comedy Meet the Focker's is the #1 comedy of all time according to the data by sales & profit.  He does a breakdown of the evolution of comedies by year and timeline.   He does a slicer that on different sales go tive us a card deck view by different profit margines.  

He shows how profit margine increases as Hollywood adopted BI, and could look at data like this, drawing quite a few laughs.

He shows how when Toy Story launched from 1995 on computer animation ruled the roost.  The most impressive thing is he did all that without touching the keyboard.  PowerView is very dynamic on what the user can do with the data.



Update 9:38

Because Data Explorer is a service and the data follows us in the Cloud, this data is mobile and available very quickly. 


tim and Nino leave the Stage and Ted returns.  Just an FYI this is code named "Data Explorer" in Azure Labs. 

Ted is talking about how this ties into Microsoft's Vision for Empouring all users through the tools they use every day.   We are discussing Self Service BI, how delivering this to the end user empowers them, and gives IT a greater roll in Governance.

He is building towards an anouncment, refrencing Cresent/Power View, PowerPivot, and mobile devices.  Ted is talking about how he used his mobile Windows Phone to look over his slide deck for today last night while he was out getting a coffee. 

He welcomes Amir Netz Technical Fellow to discuss Unlock New Insights, Anywhere.  Ted is discussing what it means to be a Technical Fellow.  Amir has a distingusihed career in BI.  "He was in BI  at Microsfot before we had a BI Stack."   With that Ted leaves the stage and turn's it over to Amir.



Update 9:31

They are now discussing what the datasets are that were brought in.  There are Bing Services will add refrence data for phone books, they are overlaying the number of High Schools within a 1 mile radious because teenagers like frozen yogurt.

I get the demographic information, however people are laughing because a demo where you track High Schooler's and where they are is a little creepy.   I get it professionally, but they should have done a different age segment.

The point is they are showing how actual Service Calls to Microsoft Applications will be able to be used to provide demographic information to provide analysis on the Azure Market Place.

Now they are using PowerPivot to pull down the information and using Sharepoint to make this available to many different users.  They were able to pull disparet datasources to determine the Shopping Centers that teenagers are most likely to shop at, and that is where the targeted location of the store should be.




Update 9:23

The demo is Hontoso Frozen Yogart to figure out the best location for their next store.   They got a SQL Azure Databae and got a normalized score about how their Stores are performing by profit.

They are extracting the data and they will use the Data Explorer to interface with that data, and then return highly relavent recommendations of what they should do next.  

He added an Excel spreadsheet of a list of Shopping Centers for the area.   He hit a button called Mashup, that will overlay the data on top of one another and start making comparisions.  There is a rank field called relative performance value.

Tim explains to us that Overlays are to the business world what Joins are for us DBA folk.  The Azure Marketplace has recommended some data that would show demographic information that would help with the decision.  Another Overlay/Join is done, and we now are starting to get recommendations.

We made a 3 way join against Excel, Azure, and the Marketplace in very little time.

Update 9:18

Ted is talking about how we integrate media from disparet sources.  Data Quality Services, Family Data, reference Data, Weather & Climate, Health and wellness, and much more all available via the Azure Marketplace.

Microsoft's Vision, being able to Enrich your data with the world's data using "Decision Engines", Empower developers to build new services and applications, offer a Vibrant marketplace ecosystem for the World's Data.

Our next demo is SQL Data Explorer.  He welcomes Tim Mllalieu and Nino Bice to the stage.   We are looking at SQL Azure Labs, it looks a lot like Windows 8 or the current Windows Phone.





Update 9:13

Scenerio

He is a web admin who wants to monitor his trafic.  The solution, Hadoop on Windows Cluster.  He starts showing us HiveQL a query that is similar to Java that will run against Hadoop on Windows Server.  

The Hadoop console is basically the command line.   He's telling us about the millions of rows that his multi-node cluster is processing along.   He wants to figure out a better way to see this data.  His connector of choice?  PowerPivot for Excel using the Hadoop conectors that are available now.

He pulls it all down, and shows us one of the workbooks that are coming with PowerPivot Denali.  He's joining this data against SQL Server, and Azure Market place data.

He's showing us the data about people hitting this website, by language.   He now switches over to Sharepoint to show us the server that he is running.   The report refresh took an hour, he is demoing how when you write a report and post it on Sharepoint, it will continue to refresh from disparet datasources and become something a business can rely on.


Ted Thanks Denny and Denny leaves the stage.




Update 9:08

Horton Works is taking the experts that help Google solve it's problems and brought them together.  He believes that Hadoop could be storing 1/2 the world's data in 3 years.   He is discussing working with other companies and that hortonworks will be working to expand this use.

This is an Open Source Community project.  Eric is very excited that they SQL Server community and all of our activitiy could be providing feed back to this project.


Eric Thanks us all and leaves the stage.

Now Denny Lee, a Principal Program Manager for the SQL Server team, is coming on stage next to discuss Activating New Types of Data. 

Denny takes the stage and ask's if we are ready for some Demo's!  YES! He says not yet.





Update 9:03

He is talking about participating in the Apache Program.  To make sure that SQL interfaces with it in the best way.

Announcements

  • Apache Hadoop-based distribution for Windows Server and Windows Azure
  • ODBC Driver and Add-in for Excel, both for Apache Hive
  • JavaScript Framework for Hadoop
  • SQL Server and SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse connectors for Apachee Hadoop

The other Announcement, they have formed a partnership with Horton Works.  He just welcomed Erick Baldeschwieler the CEO of Horton Works to the stage to talk about the partnership.

Where would you see or know Hadoop, that is the back end for Google!  This is big!


Update 8:58

He is pointing out
  • 40% Data growth rate
  • 15 out of 17 business sectors have more data sotred per company than the US Library of Congress
The vision going forward is in 3 points.


Manage and Process all types of data, mission criticle scale from on premises to cloud, Common management and development between SQL Server and SQL Azure.

We are discussing Big Data now.  Here is how he is defining it.

  • Large Data Volumes
  • Traditional and non-traditional data sources
  • New technologies and New Economics
  • New Insights
He points out that Microsoft because of Search, Email, and all thier other offerings they have over 700 PB's of DATA! 



Update 8:53

"We believe the Cloud is a hybrid work place.  You will want to keep things in your data center on the ground, and there are things you will want in the Cloud."   He just announced very slyly that they are MERGING the code base for the Cloud and Denali.  A move forward in that is SSRS in the Cloud, and features that they are delivering in Denali.
They are delivering in 3 area's
  • Mission Criticle Confidence
  • Breathrough insight
  • Cloud on your terms
Those 3 area's in Denali AlwaysOn for High Availability, Column Store Indexes for Denali first introduced in PowerPivot, Cresent which will be Power View in Denali.  Thoughts of the Cloud in what they do Juneau will be SQL Database Tools when Denali is released.

He points to some of the customers that have database's in production in Denali: Dell Pilot, Great Western Bank, and others.

DENALI HAS A NAME! SQL Server 2012

Update 8:48

Ted is talking about what we will cover today, Denali and demos.

He is Thanking PASS for all we do to spread the word about SQL Server.  He points out that we offer over 400,000 Technical Hours, 79,000 Members, 300 Microsoft MVP's, and 233 SQL PASS Chapters.  This is the largest PASS Summit Ever!

"It's been a busy year since we last got together."  Yes it has.  Choice is a big theme, he is pointing out the advances made in releases for Hardware Devices like Parallel Data Warehouse, the releases in SQL Server 2008 SP 3, 2008 R2 SP 1, the Cloud, Azure Marketplace, Management Portal for SQL Azure.




Update 8:43

He is thanking Microsoft Dell, CA, EMC, Expressor, Fusion-IO, and HP for being sponsors for the Summit.  AND A BIG THANK YOU INDEED!  We have the largest collection of vendors ever at a PASS Summit.

We are talking about the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives 2 Book that has been on sale exclusively at the Summit.  Next week it opens up every where over 53 MVP's contributed to this.  One of the great things about this book is that the MVP's do not recieve a dime for this book.  Every penny spent goes to Operation Smile to provide dental work for children in 3rd world countries.  Great Cause.

Rushabh's rapping up now, and introducing Sr. Vice President of Business Development Platform Division Ted Kummert, he owns all the applications from the Database, Application, and the way they integrate.  From the Cloud to the Ground.

Ted said that SQL Server is the most widely adopted Database platform in the world, from Ground to Cloud.  Quick dig at Oracle who just hit the cloud, and Microsoft has been ther 18 months already.  Nice.

Update 8:38

A picture of our bloggers that are at the blogger table today is posted.  a lot of amazing people, Denny Cherry, Brent Ozar, Andy Warren, Jorge Segarra, just an amazin number of people.

I'll try to get the full list out later with links to thier blogs and twitter handles.

We are talking about Twitter and the way that we use that so heavily, some of the # Hashtags, or search terms that we have created.  

Right now he is posting information about the SQL CAT Team the clinic hours that they have open, and the different sessions that they have.  At PASS this year we have.
  • 93 MVP's
  • 11 MCM's
  • 57 Microsoft Employees
  • 11 SQL CAT Presentations

The importiance of Community and building connections has been a common theme throughout the Summit.  The First Timers Program and the session with Don Gabor (Awesome and I haven't done the recap yet), had over 800 people attend it yesterday evening until 8 pm.





Update 8:28

This year PASS has given 430,000 hours of free traing, we have 80,000 members and 1 Global Region.  The goal is to get to 1 Million hours of technical training, 250,000 members and 5 Global Regions.


To help achieve this goal 3 international Board of Director seats were added to help influence this from Denmark, Germany, and I missed the third.    PASS was a partner in SQL BITS in the UK and they felt that was a very large success.

Update 8:23

Rushabh Mehta the PASS President just took the stage.  Apparently Twitter is tipping over!


Rushabh is thanking the Board of Directors, the Committie members, and making sure we know these are the people that we should approach with ideas.




Tuesday, October 11, 2011

PASS Summit Day 2: Monday Pre-Con


Our instructor is Maciej Pilecki (@DrHouseofSQL).  I’m familiar with Maciej because of MagicPASS, the SSUG I call home.  He did a presentation to us on the memory cache back in June.  It was amazing and I had promised to write a blog on that, and have not gotten that one published yet.  However this one will go first and what a day it has been.  Maciej is an MCM (Microsoft Certified Master), and a SQL Server MVP.  He has presented at conferences like the PASS Summit, Tech Ed North America, and many many more.

We spent the first half of the day discussing the SQL OS and the way that SQL Server uses CPU’s.   The second half of the day was all about Memory, and we’ve got some big changes coming in Denali.  So of particular interest is not just how we work now, but how we are going to be working in Memory in the future. 

WHAT IS THE SQL OS
SQL Server has it’s own Operating System.  WHAT!?!  Yep you heard me. 

“But Balls”, you say, “You install SQL Server on Windows right?”

Yes Dear Reader you do!  However Windows and the way that it handles processing is very different than how we would like processing to occur within SQL Server.   Windows uses Pre-emptive Scheduling.  Each Thread, work that is being done on your CPU/Processor, is given a quantum of time.  Windows as an Operating System must manage that time and make sure everybody get’s a turn. 

This is similar to having multiple sugar infused children, all of them run up to you wanting to tell you something.  You let one go, and depending on how much they are jumping over one another you may need to stop one before they are done, and have another one start to tell their story.  You’ll get back to the first one, but your job is to make sure everybody get’s a turn.  Windows will stop your Threads as they are working before they are finished, they will let them have another turn, but they need to make sure all the kids get a chance to talk.

SQL OS is a Cooperative Scheduling OS, it is a bunch of orderly Kiddo’s lining up to take turns telling you a story.  And if one needs to Wait and think they go to the back of the line and let the next one speak.  They Cooperate to make sure that things happen as orderly as possible, but most importantly if you are telling your story, your Thread is working, no one stops it until it is ready to stop.

“But Balls”, you say, “When did this change occur, this is huge?”

Yes Dear Reader it is huge!  But take heart we have all been using the SQL OS since version 7.0.  It has been maturing over the years and we see a lot of benefits of that today in 2008 R2 and we will see even more in Denali.   We spent the rest of the morning talking about how CPU’s work within the SQL OS, and I learned more that I have time to write.  This was an incredible day of training, and I can’t wait to apply some of what I learned.


LUNCH

Some times you just have to smile at how things work out.  At the lunch break I went down a little later than the rest of the group.   I was walking down  and I saw my friend Eric Wishdal (@EricWisdahl | Blog), and I asked if I could join him.  Eric is a veteran of many SQL Saturday’s and PASS events in Florida.  He is a great guy and has a very sharp wit.  So Thousands of miles from home I meet up with a friend who is just up the road.

As we waited through the line and got our food, great meal and props to the folks at PASS, we arrived at the end and I struck up a conversation with Brent Ozar (@BrentO | Blog) and along walks Jeremiah Peschka (@Peschkaj | Blog).

If you are reading my blog more than likely you’ve heard of these guys, they’re kinda a big deal around here.  We all sit down at a table as we are eating we are joined by Mike Hilwig (@mikehilwig | Blog).  I met Mike at SQL Saturday 79 in South Florida, and he is awesome.   It was really nice lunch with great company, as Stan Lee would say ‘Nuff Said!

MEMORY, RESOURCE GOVERNOR, AND EXTENDED EVENTS
We spent the second half of the day learning about how Memory and Buffers work and are managed within the SQL OS, how Resource Governor works internally, how you can bind SQL to multiple ports and affinity each port to a specific set of CPU’s, what Maciej called a poor man’s Resource Governor, looked at Extended Events, and some of the new features coming up in Denali.

This was an absolutely wonderful day, and I learned a lot about a portion of SQL that I had only just started to scratch the surface on.  

The rest of the evening was spent writing and in the room.  There is a lot to do this week, and I’m looking forward to some of the social activities tonight, but I wasn’t feeling up to going out.  I got a pizza and sat down to do a lot of writing.

And now on to day 3!

Thanks,

Brad

Sunday, October 9, 2011

PASS Summit Day 1: Travel

I woke up this morning around 2:45 AM.  Having packed the day before I just had to get ready to take go and I was out the door.  The drive in was a rainy one, but the nice thing about an early morning drive is that the roads were pretty empty so no traffic jams.  So a nice smooth ride into the city, and other than getting a little SQL Karaoke practice in completely uneventful. 

So now  I'm in Tampa and about to board, so this will expand as the day goes along.  But here is an early morning picture of beautiful Tampa from the airport!  As you can see it is dark and just starting to come to life.  The early morning work force is out, people heading home from vacations, and those of us bleary eyed travelers heading for many other destinations.   So I'm going dark for the flight, I've got some compression topics to write on for SQL U next week.



A quick picture from the clouds (34,000 feet) and I'm all back to being quite again. 



DALLAS FT. WORTH

I'll be less than half way through with the travel portion of the day by now.  The big flight will be the almost 6 hours from Dallas to Seattle.  I'm looking forward to landing already, I'm not sure how much adrenalin will continue to keep me going but I'm pretty sure I'll need a nap at some point today.



I love walking through airports, there is always something that is there to impress and there is always something cliché as well.   I found both.


A quick coffee and bagel and I was off to the Concourse.  I met up with some folks that are heading to the Summit as well.  One is from the Tampa area and the other is Ed from Arkansas.  We hit it off talking about the Pre-Con’s we would be attending and I found a friend to share a cab to the Westin. 


 Before you know it we were boarding again.  The flight is pretty packed this time and I’m in the Isle so I would have thought no pictures from the plane window.  However there was a very nice lady from Alaska sitting against the window and when I asked she was polite enough to take a picture as we were passing over the Rockies. 



SEATTLE

 
Finally on the ground.  Ed and I shared a cab ride over to the Westin, as they did not have a shuttle at the airport.  The Summit is a wonderful opportunity to meet new people, as we come together to learn about SQL Server with one another, and it was fantastic to meet Ed.   We agreed to meet up at the lobby and find some food, I was going on a bagel and some yogurt for the day, Ed was hard core and hadn’t had a thing.



While in the lobby I Tweeted the plan that we had, and quickly heard back from the SQL Dynamic Duo of Karla (@KarlaKay22 | Blog ) and Rodney Landrum (@SQLBeat | Blog).  They were at the Tap House, which had some of the best jumbilia I’ve ever had.


From here I had a great time with new, old, and current friends.  It is amazing how far you can travel in a day, to remember the things that you’ve already known.  Several games of pool later, I still can’t play worth a damn.  I have the occasional flashes of brilliance that peter out after a max of three good shots.  But playing lousy pool is a lot of fun when you’ve got friends to play it with.

From there we did a walk about the city and looked at several different destinations.  We headed over to the Convention Center and Registered for the reason we are all here.   It was amazing to see all of the people that came to register early.  A lot of them were people I had met before, and a couple whom I had been wanting to meet.  I got to met Brent Ozar (@BrentO | Blog) who is taller and younger than I imagined.  And I mean taller folks.  I’m not a short guy, but I’m right on the 6 foot mark, so when people are taller than me I notice.   And did I mention he looked younger than I expected J.

With that Rodney, Karla, and myself set off for a hole in the wall noodle shop for a quick fix of our favorite delicacies, I can never resist a good Pad-Thai.  And with that I’m heading back to finish up some work on Compression.  Time to get a good nights rest.  Tomorrow starts the Pre-con’s.

Thanks,

Brad

Friday, October 7, 2011

Top 4 Reasons Next Week is a Big Week

Hello Dear Reader, next week is a very big week for me SQL wise.  Family wise I will be missing the heck out of my wife and my kiddos while I’m half a continent away.   Just this last week my Bug lost another tooth, the baby got even cuter (don’t ask me how she does it constantly), my Big Guy got even bigger (seriously my 7 year old has pec’s), and my wife continues to be AWESOME, (the Bug and I had a conference and deliberated on this earlier in the week).  So while I’m missing all the other Balls, I’ll be busy out of my mind. 

“So Balls,” you say, “What’s keeping you so busy?”

No good way to say it other than list it.
1.       My First PASS Summit
2.       I’m sitting at the Bloggers Table at the PASS Summit
3.       I’m Presenting TWO times at the PASS Summit
4.       I’m the Professor of Compression Next Week For SQL University!

Any other week one of those items would keep me fully occupied.   Next week I will be utterly consumed learning, teaching, meeting, and greeting.  So let’s break it down a little.

MY FIRST PASS SUMMIT

This needs no introduction.  If you are involved with SQL Server you know that the PASS Summit is the biggest SQL Server Conference in the World.  Not North America, not Europe, not Asia, the WORLD.  The brightest SQL Speakers in the World will be there.  People from all over the Globe, experts from many many nations will be together in one spot.   Top Microsoft Experts, the Cat Team, many Microsoft Developers for the SQL Server Team, you name it the PASS Summit has it.

I’ve wanted to go to this event since I started seeing advertisements for it on SQLSeverCentral.com, for the last 4 or 5 years.   Getting to watch the streaming keynote last year just made my desire to go grow even more, and now here it is! 

If you have never heard of the PASS Summit then go check out the current website.  As if that isn’t enough I’m attending 2 of the great pre-cons that are being offered.    I will be blogging like a mad man while I’m out there so keep checking back Dear Reader, this should be a fun week!

SITTING AT THE BLOGGERS TABLE


http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2011/SummitContent.aspx PHOTO CREDIT: Pat Wright
I’ve blogged previously on The Top 5 Reasons You Should Be On Twitter, but I could add a 6th as well.  Opportunity.  On Twitter it was announced that PASS was accepting applications to sit at the Bloggers table.   I jumped.  Then I emailed the contact listed and WAHOO I was selected!   As a result I’ll have access to blog from a table of Blogger All-STAR’s and SQL MVP’s, and lil ol’ me J!

So not only will I be at the top event for SQL Server, I’ve got a front row seat.  I’ll do live blogging of the Keynotes, and attempt a daily re-cap.  As I snap pictures I’ll make sure to get them uploaded and attached to the blog.

PRESENTING TWICE AT THE PASS SUMMIT!


My wife’s best friend had a quote on her Facebook page that I feel describes me to a T, since she told me it I laughed and then I thought, “If I could only get that on a Family Crest”. ….  The quote “I’ve got 2 speeds; Off & M@Ther F#(king ON”.  That has been me my whole life, when I’m down I’m out.  When I’m up and running, there’s no stopping.

During this week I’m presenting a Lightning Round Talk 24-a 5 minute Horror Story, and  the Page & Row Compress Deep Dive.   I’ve been working on a lot of great Demo’s that I can bring to the table.  I presented the Deep Dive recently at SQL Saturday 85, and internally for my DBA team.  I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback, and I’m really excited to give this a 3rd time.   The 5 minute Horror Story is a real life adventure, with appropriate details blurred, from Father’s day 2009.   Show up to the session and you hear all about the wonderful world of a 24-7 on call DBA and why backups are so important.   Not just that you take them, but if something goes wrong that you grab a fresh set.

PROFESSOR OF COMPRESSION FOR SQL UNIVERSITY


Jorge Segarra (@SQLChicken | Blog)  is the Chancellor of SQL University.  If you’ve never heard of SQL U then you should head over there and take a look.  It is a web blog that collects the input from the experts in our field and has them write on a new topic a week. 

Think college syllabus but for SQL, with different Topics, and written by MVP’s & Experts.  I’m honored beyond belief to be among them, and starting next week I’ll have a Lead Up to the Deep Dive.  I’m still writing and formulating as we speak and a lot of this will get finished up Sunday to Monday.  But I’ll have a post a day on Compression.  We’ll start up slow and work our way through a set of topics that will help you understand Compression and feel good about taking it to your work and finding ways you can apply it.

Alright Dear Reader the break from blogging is over, time to get to the grind stone and get working!  I hope your week is a good one.

Thanks,

Brad