Today is Monday, the first day of TechEd 2010 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence conference. A few thoughts follow the slide show below.

Wow! What an amazing experience this has been! I would encourage anyone with the interest and opportunity to attend.  There is literally something here for everyone; technical tracks, business tracks, hands on labs, certification, media, etc…

The opening keynote was started by a local Jazz band that did a good job warming the crowd for Ted Kummert to come on out.  Ted is a senior VP for Business Platforms and immediately placed his focus on ‘the cloud’ and dynamic IT.  Quite often we hear a lot about the cloud and as a DBA and Developer it was amazing to see his demonstrate this infrastructure. There is no question how Microsoft is digesting their own technologies at internet scale with their Bing, Hotmail, and MSN platforms.  Although a little Long, Ted did a great job and set a clear direction for the conference and the continued push for cloud computing.

My first session of the day was Report Parts for Reporting Services in SQL 2008 R2 (SSRS).  In short it takes the ‘web part’ concept you’ll find in SharePoint and takes it to the reporting platform.  SSRS has a host of upgrades from 2005 to 2008 and report parts is simply one of them.  Although a minor feature of on the items I’m excited about is query sets and the ability to expose, filter, and most importantly cache the sets.

Next came the session on Fast Track data warehousing. This was a bit technical even for a technical crowd because you’re getting down to the level of system design, hardware selection, spindles, LUNs, extents, etc… If these terms are not too familiar you might be like one of the many people that got up after the few opening minutes.  There were however, a number of very good data points that relate to database any systems design: know your workload when designing the system, do you best to understand potential growth, size your CPU cores/disks/arrays correctly, manage your extent allocations, use of data compression, allocate for growth upfront as possible.

The final session of the day covered StreamInsight which is an amazing technology.  It was the program manager for SQL Server who ran the session and painted a clear picture of StreamInsight as a product that is designed to handle ‘data in-flight.’  Consider use cases of web analytics, manufacturing, smart electric grids, or financial solutions where data is born digitally and must be handled in real time using event driven notification.  In short, StreamInsight is built on .Net 4.0 and offers an input adapter to get data into the stream engine and an output adapter to persist the data somewhere or simply handle it however you wish. It’s inside the stream engine where queries and additional logic exists to do the actual processing of the data event.  It was extremely impressive to hear how MSN/Bing handles half-a-billion data events being sent from their web farm to StreamInsight for the purpose of serving up targeted advertising.

So I’m working on a small digital signage project. One of the first challenges is getting a computer setup to run the display and the thought occurred what is the best way to do that. In the advent of low power CPUs I took the dive and purchase an OMAP3 based development board. One of the first goals is to build a digital display appliance.

Have a look at the setup.

I choose the ThunderPack from TechNexion because it included the LCD screen, Wifi, Ethernet, HDMI, and a basic build of the Angstrom Linux distribution.

Pros - So far …

• Easy to order, fast shipping, responsive to email support
• Good construction, feels solid when handling it
• Pretty good software builds to get you up and running
• Decent documentation, you will need to have moderate linux systems experience though
• It boots right up and you can start using Angstrom right on the LCD display

Cons - So far …

• The 1st SD card used had a lot of difficulties getting the file system built (start with one under 2GB)

Thats about it, trying to keep it short and simple. Next up is building Android and seeing how it does…

If there are any questions please let me know.

Here is a quick little snippet of TSQL; what is running and that percent complete.  This comes from using dm_exec_requests and the percent complete value there.


select T.text,
R.Status,
R.Command,
DatabaseName = db_name(R.database_id),
R.cpu_time,
R.total_elapsed_time,
R.percent_complete
from sys.dm_exec_requests R
cross apply sys.dm_exec_sql_text(R.sql_handle) T


Thats right …. http://facebook.com/jon.shoberg is all mine. Too bad I didn’t got for something like default.aspx (which I kind of like better…).

Its amazing to see the number of activities the Ohio State Parks service runs. One of those being an outdoor rifle and pistol range in the southern Waldo, Ohio. Yesterday Mike and I went up to sight in his M1 Garand. Aside from me shooting out both legs of the target stand (was aiming for the second one) we had the outstanding opportunity to shoot a Barrett 98 Bravo which fires a .338 Lapua Magnum round. Let me just say this thing is unbelievable! It was putting round after round almost though the same hole. Here is my ‘bulls eye’ shot from the bench and Mike’s too.

When you are having dinner in a tourist area (Miami Beach) … watch out …

It’s good to be back from the Avectra Users and Developers Conference for 2009; had an amazing time in the sessions learning about product enhancements, additional functionality, and meeting the friendly and amazingly knowledgeable staff.

I’d say some key takeaways for me would be:

• Strong focus on web services for integration; makes me excited about developing a mobile app
• Strong focus on Sharepoint as NetForum’s external presence and great conversation with susqtech.
• Each staff member REALLY knew their respective area of expertise and showed a willingness to find solutions
• Really good technical tracks in the conference series
• Brought back some good information and specifics on looking at the NetForum 3.0 upgrade

Some stuff I’d like to see:

• Would be nice to have a highly technical session for SQL developers and .Net; maybe sharing with the Q&A practices that Avectra’s developers use. I think that is what makes the ‘Open Developer’s Forum’ so good is because it allows for asking those kinds of questions … getting deep into the tech.
• OLAP … and this comes from the technical concepts at point above. I think business intelligence (BI) is a hard piece to integrate. From the developer’s perspective though it would be a great benefit to have Avectra put forward an OLAP structure its clients can build their own reporting and BI from. It’s something I’ve seen in other enterprise products such as BlackBaud enterprise (not quite the same market space but I think it plays).
• Access to power outlets in the conference rooms; on a few occasions it would have been great to pick-up a quick charge.
• Perhaps there is a way to improve the vetting of the association speakers; not displeased but one or two were a little more of a ‘miss’ than a ‘hit’ as I felt the content could go deeper.

Recently Google released a new service named Latitude. Very simly it takes your location from mobile device or online using iGoogle and Gears and plots it on a map.  From there you can share your current location with friends and contacts who also use google latitude.  There are a number of privacy options on the service; set who and how you want to share location or the option to set a specific location too.

Not sure how much I’ll be using this or a service like Latitude but its interesting to discover and see how it works.

A little non-multimedia post coming your way … a little bit of TSQL goodness for calculating the distance between two latitude and longitude coordinates.


SET ANSI_NULLS OFF
GO
SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER OFF
GO
CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[HaversineDistanceMiles] (
@lat1 float,
@lon1 float,
@lat2 float,
@lon2 float
)
RETURNS float AS
BEGIN

declare @dlon float
declare @dlat float
declare @a float
declare @c float
declare @d float

select @dlon=radians(@lon2)-radians(@lon1)
select @dlat=radians(@lat2)-radians(@lat1)

END


I my current age of 31 I have successfully passed the teenage audio test.

This sound can generally only heard by people under the age of 25. It has been used as a deterrent device to keep teenagers from loitering in malls and shops, and sounds similar to a buzzing mosquito