SQLRally 2012 Dallas – Recap

PASS and NTSSUG (North Texas SQL Server User Group) hosted this year’s SQLRally. As the chapter leader for HASSUG (Houston Area SQL Server User Group), I was also part of the host team and volunteered on the program committee and served as a room monitor during the conference. Putting on a conference of this size with mostly volunteers (there is some paid staff from PASS HQ, but the majority of the work is by volunteers) is no small feat and the NTSSUG team did a great job of organizing.  

Sessions Attended

Based on the sessions offered at SQLRally, I set my focus on learning about SQL Server 2012 features, investigating areas outside my current area of expertise (enterprise deployments), and considering my future career development.

• Bob Ward – What’s New for SQL Server 2012 Supportability

• Craig Purnell – Upgrade Roadmap: Let’s Delve into SQL Server 2012

• Kathi Kellenberger – SQL Server 2012 T-SQL

• Denny Cherry – Using SQL Server 2012’s Always On

• Suresh Kandoth – SQL Server 2012: Memory Manager Rebooted

• Tim Mitchell – Introduction to Data Quality Services

• Robert Davis – TempDB: Performance and Manageability

• Erin Welker – So, You Want to Start a Career in BI

• Andy Warren – Building Your Professional Development Plan

All of the sessions were top quality and I will definitely use what I learned in both my day-to-day work and overall career development.

Networking

SQLRally had lots of opportunities for networking, both informal and formal. The scheduled opportunities included:

• Wednesday night’s “Meet the SQL Professionals”

• Thursday night’s “SQLKaraoke”

• Friday morning’s “SQLRally at Starbucks”

During lunch and between sessions provided ample opportunity for informal networking. And, I took time off during one session timeslot to continue networking and be available at the PASS Community Corner to promote local user groups (continuing the networking after attendees get home) and the virtual chapters. As several people have confessed (among them Andy Warren, Brian Moran, and Tim Mitchell), the networking aspect is actually probably the most important activity when attending a conference. This is how #SQLFamily is built.

Things Done Well

• Guidebook – This mobile app is a great way to keep attendees up-to-date with speaker/session changes. Other than seeing that a printed agenda was in our attendee bag, I never looked at it and used Guidebook exclusively for checking where I needed to be next!

• SQL Clinic – This was a “must-have” with the event in Dallas so near to the SQL CSS team’s home and didn’t disappoint with members of SQLCAT also in attendance.

• Networking opportunities – already mentioned. Good job by the planners!

• Bus – looping between convention center and SQLKaraoke site was a win!

Things to Improve

• Guidebook (yes, it is on both the “done well” and the “to improve” list!)
  • Include room numbers along with the Session Title and Session Number in the main entry, if possible. You had to click the session to find the room number; simple once you knew to do this, but many people didn’t realize it.
  • Include all activities in the “schedule”:
    • Welcome Session 
    • Closing Session
    • WIT Luncheon
    • Include all “extracurricular” activities – from SQLKaraoke to Starbucks Networking.
• Beverage choices during breaks – coffee or nothing – how about some water and sodas?
• Ensure bottled water in the sessions rooms for each speaker.
• Signage to A4 ballroom from the majority of session rooms could have been better. It was confusing to most attendees that one session room (A4) was far away from the majority of the session rooms and on a different floor level. 
• Station volunteers at the top of the escalators and along the hallways, not just at the rooms to help attendees find their way. 
• Where to find the speakers’ slide decks? I had several people ask me during the conference, but I had not personally looked for them yet and couldn’t answer. Now, I have looked and I can’t find them either!
• Overall Event Evaluation form – I hear they will be done electronically after the event, but I would have liked to have it available to comment on as I experienced the conference real-time.

Event Format

Instead of 2 pre-con days, consider having only 1 pre-con day or splitting into a pre-con day and post-con day. Consider having the post-con session on Saturday. The success of SQLSaturday has already shown that many of us are willing to give up some of our personal time to improve our skills.  As part of the purpose of SQLRally (at least in my mind) is to provide a “taste” of Summit and at a lower price point, I don’t see many people justifying being out of the office 4 days (or 5 if Monday is a travel day); that would be practically the same as Summit (unless they are local).  By combining the SQLRally 2-day main event with a post-conference Saturday all-day seminar, maybe more people could convince their employers to pay for SQLRally and the post-con since in theory it isn’t all on “company time”.  Attendees can make the case that they and their employer have a joint investment in their training.

Personally, there was a pre-con on Tuesday that I probably could have justified, but not one on Wednesday which fit my development needs. Since I was coming from out-of-town, this just didn’t work for me logistically or financially. Consequently, I didn’t attend any pre-con. If I could have attended that all-day session on consecutive days with the main SQLRally days, then I would have done that – even if one of the days was a Saturday. However, I recognize that this format (especially using a Saturday) may not work for others and may not work with venue rental. I know PASS has tried the pre-con\post-con format in the past with Summit, but is back to two days of pre-cons for whatever reasons. I think the host team for the next SQLRally, however, should seriously reconsider this concept for maximum attendance.

Conclusion

Overall the event provided great technical content and networking opportunities to the SQL Server community. While many people who attended SQLRally have previously attended a PASS Summit, I talked to just as many people who have not attended a Summit, but now have it on their list of things to do! I think the event also did a good job of reinforcing the value of local user groups, and even encouraged some folks to consider starting a user group or hosting a SQLSaturday in their area.  This was only the second SQLRally event in the United States, so it will be interesting to see how this event evolves for 2013 filling the gap between Summit and SQLSaturdays.

Improving Speaker Rating Evaluations

I finished compiling all the individual session speaker ratings from SQLSaturday #107 held in Houston on April 21, 2012 and sent the results to the speakers this past weekend.  We used the default form provided on the SQLSaturday Admin site, which had two basic inputs.

1) Expectations:  Did Not Meet \ Met \ Exceeded. 

2) Overall Quality of the Presentation: rate 1-5 where 5=great.

Plus there was a request to write any other comments on the back of the form.  A few people did provide some constructive criticism which the speakers can use to improve; many people provided positive encouragement; but most wrote nothing.

Anybody have a problem with this form?  I do; and I’d like to make it more useful for both organizers and speakers.  But, how?

We’ve been conditioned since early childhood in school to receive a grade for our performance. Consequently, we tend to provide evaluations with number ratings so that we can come up with an average rating for each speaker.  The problem with this type of rating for speakers, in my opinion, is that there are no defined criteria for the students (e.g. graders) to use in their evaluation – it is purely subjective and purely based on the individual’s experiences which could vary wildly at an event like SQLSaturday.     

The “Expectations” rating to me is really not very useful – it is too general.  There are two things that I, personally, am gauging from an “expectations” basis when I attend a session: 1) the content to be delivered based on the abstract provided; 2) the quality of the speaker based on the presenter’s professional credentials.  However, what if I’m so new to a topic area that I really do not comprehend what the abstract means (although I think I do) and therefore my expectations of what I’m about to experience are very different than the reality?  Or, what if I have really high expectations of a well-known speaker and I feel like their presentation is just average? How do I handle this in my evaluation? Based on what I saw in our SQLSaturday evaluations, it seems to me that most people whose expectations were not met also rated the overall quality of the presentation low.  But, how can that be, when the majority of the other attendees at the same session believed that the session met or exceeded their expectations and gave a high rating on the overall quality?  I saw this anomaly several times.

One of the goals of SQLSaturday is to grow the speaker base. I don’t know about you, but “grow” to me doesn’t mean just numbers, it means providing experience and maturity. How do we get the necessary feedback to the speakers to enable them to improve their presentation skills in order to better train us?

Speakers, what input would you like from your audience?  If you were to redesign this simple evaluation form, what 2 or 3 questions would you ask? Do you derive value from a subjective numeric rating?

SQLSaturday organizers and User Group leaders, how would you like to see speakers evaluated to help you in selecting sessions for your next event?

Please post your comments here.

SQLSaturday #107 – Event Evaluation

April 21, 2012, marked the 176^th anniversary of the Battle of San Jacinto, my nephew’s 14^th birthday, and the 2^nd “annual” SQLSaturday in Houston hosted by the Houston Area SQL Server User Group! If you follow us on Twitter, then you may have noticed that @HASSUG uses as its picture the San Jacinto Monument.

So, I could delve off into Texas history now and remind everyone that this epic 18-minute battle ultimately resulted in the United States acquiring present-day Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma. But, I’d better get back to SQLSaturday #107 and the topic at hand ….

Our actual attendance this year was about 250 – or 73% of those who registered for this FREE training event showed up. We had 60 sessions on the schedule provided by 15 Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), several Idera ACEs, and some first-time presenters as well.  

Yes – 60 sessions is quite ambitious! But, because we were using a school facility (YES Prep Public School – North Central Campus – please go read about them!) with an average “comfortable” capacity of 25 students per classroom – we needed to run 10 sessions in each time slot to accommodate the number of attendees that we expected! Thanks to the large number of attendees who used the session builder tool, we were able to move the session with the highest anticipated attendance in each time slot to the Auditorium\Cafeteria. However, I’m acutely aware that in at least two time slots we still had sessions in the regular classrooms which were SRO!  Amazingly – I’ve not found a single complaint about this in the overall event evaluation forms – so THANK YOU for being so understanding of the limitations of the facility!  

I do want to apologize for the break-down in communication during one of the morning time slots. We did not have a volunteer stationed outside the room of the session which had been moved to the Auditorium and we did not have adequate signage about the move. Unfortunately, a room full of people sat waiting on the speaker who was actually in a larger room speaking to an unexpectedly small audience for quite a while before we got the anticipated audience redirected to the correct room for the session they wanted to hear. So, again, my sincerest apologies to both the speaker, Benjamin Nevarez (twitter | blog), and to the attendees who really wanted to hear his session, Inside the SQL Server Query Optimizer.

We had a couple of other “issues” that I want to mention in hopes that other event teams take note and don’t have the same oversights. One, provide lots and lots of coffee all day – enough said? Two, ensure any directional signs you plan to put out in the vicinity of the event site are in place well before the scheduled “start” time (and have them onsite ready to go the night before). Three, communicate schedule\room changes as “loudly” as you can – with BIG BOLD BRIGHT signage updates and volunteers stationed to help people adjust. Four, SpeedPASS is great – if the attendees remember to print it out and bring it with them; however, we should have had two laptops and printers for those who didn’t do this ahead of time instead of one. We also experienced a technical glitch such that only if the attendee knew their PASS ID and password to login, then they could print it as opposed to us using the SQLSaturday Admin site to print on-the-fly for them.  PASS has promised to get that issue fixed. Even so, I was amazed (I don’t know why!) at the number of people who did print their SpeedPASS and bring it with them. So, strongly encourage this in all of your communications with your attendees.              

Lots of things did go right thanks to the great team we had this year. On the Steering Team with me were: Jonathan Gardner (twitter | blog), Malik Al-Amin (twitter), and Lynn McKee (twitter).  Core Team members were: Eric Cruz, Ken Goins, Vicky Harp (twitter | blog), Will Howard (twitter | blog), and Amy Muehleman. At the risk of overlooking someone (please comment if I’ve left you out!) – the Friday night setup crew and bag stuffers included Leah Guzman, Martin Mason, Revathi Iswarya Nambi, Brandon Smith (twitter), and Kendal van Dyke (twitter | blog).  Saturday volunteers included Linda Harmes, Allen Kinsel (twitter | blog), Robert McLeroy, and Jenny Yang, plus a whole slew of Idera folks and the previously mentioned Friday night crew.    

But, at the end of the day, how did the attendees feel about the event? Last year, we tried online evals and as techie as we all are – the response was abysmal. So, this year – we killed a few trees in the name of collecting more feedback (data) in the form of an overall event evaluation form, plus speaker session evaluation forms. We asked attendees to rate their experience in the following categories on a scale of 1-5, where 5=great. We had 89 people turn in the event evaluation form and here are the averaged results:

We recognize from the ratings that the bar has been set pretty high. If you have any additional feedback for us to help us provide an even better experience next time – please comment here!

Additionally, we asked the attendees to list their favorite session and the best speaker they heard. The top vote-getters are:

• Favorite Sessions:
  • T-SQL Brush-up: The Best Things You Forgot You Knew (Jen McCown)
  • Avoid Errors on Errors (Rick Morelan)
  • Eating the Elephant: SQL Server Table Partitioning (Mike Fal)
  • SQL Admin Best Practices with DMVs (William Assaf)
• Best Speakers:
  • Kalen Delaney
  • Thomas LeBlanc
  • Jen McCown
  • Sean McCown

Thanks to all the speakers for giving so generously of your time to prepare and present, and in many cases travel significant distances. That high overall event score is due to the value of the content that you provided to the attendees making it worth their while to give up a beautiful Saturday to further their career development.  

And, finally THANK YOU to our sponsors! Platinum sponsor Idera provided not only funds at the highest level, but man-power to assist with the event as well. Idera was also the sponsor for the precon with Kalen Delaney (twitter | blog) on Friday. I can’t thank Amy Muehleman enough for all of her hard work coordinating the precon, speaker dinner, breakfast catering, and after party for us.  Red-Gate and HP were Gold-level sponsors and provided lots of great swag.  Silver sponsors were Confio, Texas Memory Systems, Joes2Pros (who also provided books and training DVDs as swag), Fusion-IO, Insource Technology, New Horizons, and PASS. Bronze sponsors were CozyRoc (who also provided pens & notepads for attendees) and SQLWatchmen (also the proud sponsor of the precon VGA cable). The publishers McGraw-Hill, Morgan Kaufman, and O’Reilly generously provided technical books for swag. Sponsors, your generosity to the SQL Server community enables us to provide SQLSaturday free of charge to attendees.  Thank you for partnering with us.

In wrapping up, I must share my favorite feedback on the day (which someone told me at lunch) – “Oracle has nothing like this!”  

Thank you SQL Server Community!

SQLSaturday #107 – Schedule Posted!

The session schedule for SQLSaturday #107 is now posted!  We have several MVPs as well as local speakers who will be presenting in Application Development, Business Intelligence, Database Administration and Professional Development tracks. Take advantage of this FREE day of training in Houston, April 21, 2012.  Lunch will be catered again this year by Hinze’s BBQ (and we have a vegetarian option) – for which we are requesting attendees pay $10 via Paypal when registering.  Space is limited, so register soon! Then click on the Schedule option and choose the Schedule Builder to plan your day (and help us determine which sessions will require the auditorium!).

See you there!  And plan to attend the “after party” networking event Saturday evening – more info coming soon!

SQLSaturday #107 – Sessions Announced

Schedule is now proposed (http://www.sqlsaturday.com/107/schedule.aspx) and speakers have been notified that the following sessions (updates in bold below) have been selected for presentation at SQLSaturday #107 in Houston, April 21!  Register soon as seating is limited for this event! http://www.sqlsaturday.com/107/register.aspx

AD Sessions

Boles, Kevin: SQL Server 2012 TSQL Enhancements and Additions

Boles, Kevin:  Windowing Functions: THE Reason to Upgrade to 2012

Corbett, Jack:  Introduction to Triggers

Harp, Vicky:  Edge Case Testing for the Database Professional

Hokanson, Kris:  Beyond the Where: Full Text Search tips and trick

Loski, Russel:  Introduction to the XML source

McCown, Jennifer:  Unraveling Tangled Code – A Spellbinding Tale

McCown, Jennifer:  T-SQL Brush-up:The Best Things You Forgot You Knew

Morela, Rick:  Avoid Errors on Errors

Pastrick, Wendy:  Read Dirty to Me – Isolation Levels/User Impact

Rosenberg, Mark:  Optimizing Stored Procedures

Van Dyke, Kendal: Working with XML in SQL Server

Warren, Andy:  SQL Server Security for Developers

BI Sessions

Costello, Tim:  Data Visualization primer:  What you need to know

Hotek, Michael:  Build a Data Warehouse in Less than 1 Hour

LeBlanc, Thomas:  Dimensional Modeling 101

Mitchell, Tim:  Top 10 New Features of SSIS in 2012

Mitchell, Tim:  Parent/Child Structures in SSIS

Newby, Michael D.: EXCEL @ SQL Reporting

Pearson III, William E.:  Becoming DAX: An Introduction …

Pearson III, William E.:  Many-to-Many: Multiple Calendars in a Single Cube

Serra, James:  Scaling SQL Server to HUNDREDS of Terabytes

Smith, Bryan:  Implementing Columnstore Indexes

Smith, Bryan:  An Introduction to Big Data for BI

Stein, David:  Data Warehousing – How to Convince “The Bobs”

DBA Sesssions

Assaf, William:  SQL Admin Best Practices with DMV’s

Brown, Wesley:  Benchmarking, Baselines and Monitoring Storage

Brown, Wesley:  Solid State Storage Deep Dive

Cook, John:  SQL Server Tips and Tricks

Davis, Robert:  Replication Magic: Initializing From Backups

Davis, Robert:  Strategies for Working with VLDBs

Delaney, Kalen:  Costs of Concurrency

Fal, Michael:  Eating the Elephant: SQL Server Table Partitioning

Fal, Michael: The Fabulous Query Plan Primer

Fernandez, Argenis:  Rolling Upgrades Leveraging Database Mirroring

Fernandez, Argenis:  Troubleshooting SQL Server with SysInternals Tools

Griffin, Janis:  Don’t Panic, DBAs!  Databases on VMware made easy.

Hotek, Michael:  Knowledge from Data–FileTable and Semantic Search

Hotek, Michael:  Recover from a Disaster–What to do When All Fails

Humphrey, Eric:  .NET Powers Activate! Form of PowerShell!

LeBlanc, Thomas:  Execution Plan Basics – Beginners

Leo, Christina:  SQL Server Internals:  It’s What’s for Dinner!

Mendo, AJ:  Standardize Your Environment With Best Practices

McCown, Sean:  Beginning Powershell for DBAs 1.0

McCown, Sean:  Understanding Backups

Murphy, Jim:  AlwaysOn – Finally, A usable ‘mirror’!

Nevarez, Benjamin:  Top Query Optimizer Topics for Better Performance

Nevarez, Benjamin:  Inside the SQL Server Query Optimizer

Ormrod, Steven:  SQL Server Amnesia

Pastrick, Wendy:  Transactional Replication 101

Radney, Tim:  It is TEMPDB, Why Should You Care?

Radney, Tim:  You Inherited a Database, Now What?

Saleme, Mike:  A consolidation architecture to host 1000s of DBs

Sterrett, John:  Evaluate your daily Checklist with PBM and CMS

Professional Development Sessions

Wilson, Nancy Hidy:  WIT Discussion Panel (Kalen Delaney, Janis Griffin, Jen McCown, Wendy Pastrick, Christina Leo)

Warren, Andy:  Building Your Professional Development Plan

McCown, Sean and Jen:   Mouth Wide Shut: Coherent Interviewing

Van Dyke, Kendal:  Building Your Own SQL Server Virtual Playground

Moreign, Anthony {Tex}:  The {Microsoft} Cloud and I

Wong, Jason:  A Comparison of SQL Server and Oracle

 

SQLSaturday #107 – Houston – Wanted: Sponsors! Speakers! Attendees!

SQLSaturday #107 is scheduled April 21, 2012, in Houston at YES Prep School – North Central Campus. We (Houston Area SQL Server User Group) are currently still accepting sponsors, speakers, attendees and volunteers for this event! 

Sponsors, click sponsors to find out how you can engage with us. This is a great way for you to interact with SQL Server professionals from the Greater Houston area and surrounding environs. At our previous SQLSaturday in January 2010, we had over 200 attendees from all over Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas, plus a few visitors from other states as well. We are expecting at least 300 attendees this year.

The Call for Speakers is open until March 15. We already have over 90 sessions submitted, so we have a lot of great sessions to choose from already, but we want more! We are looking for sessions in the “track” areas of Database Administration, Database Application Development, Business Intelligence (SSAS, SSIS, SSRS, etc.), and Professional Development. Additional topic areas to consider when submitting sessions are: PowerShell, SQL Azure, and SQL Server 2012.

Attendees, please register as soon as possible – this is a FREE event (although we request $10 to help cover lunch/snack costs), but it really helps us with our planning if you all don’t wait until the very last minute to sign up!  We have a lot of great speaker submissions already, so we expect the content provided to exceed last year’s SQLSaturday #57 event.  Seating will be limited and you don’t want to miss out on this great training event. And, when you are signing up, consider volunteering. We have several committees which will need additional volunteers to perform tasks leading up to and on the day of the event. If you already registered and didn’t check the volunteer box and would now like to volunteer, please email the steering team.

If you are attending from out of town (or across town), the recommended hotel is the Hilton Garden Inn Houston / Bush Intercontinental Airport.  Mention “PASS” when registering for the discount rate.

Finally, don’t forget to register separately for the all-day preconference seminar, SQL Server Query Plans: Tuning & Management with Kalen Delaney, to be held on Friday, April 20, 2012. Details here! Early bird registration is available through February 29, 2012.  

SQLSaturday #107 – Pre-Conference Seminar Announced!

In conjunction with SQLSaturday #107, scheduled April 21, 2012, in Houston, the Houston Area SQL Server User Group will be hosting a full-day pre-conference seminar, SQL Server Query Plans: Tuning & Management by Kalen Delaney, on Friday, April 20, 2012. The seminar is sponsored by Idera, provider of SQL Server management solutions, helping us to provide this seminar at a low cost to you.

Kalen is a long-time Microsoft SQL Server MVP, author, consultant, and trainer. She is generally recognized as the foremost authority on SQL Server internals per her series of “Inside SQL Server” books, articles in SQL Server Magazine, training classes and conference presentations.

This low-cost single-day seminar will be held at the Hilton Garden Inn near Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport which is also very convenient to the SQLSaturday #107 event location for those attending both events from out of town.  A continental breakfast and boxed lunch will be provided on Friday to pre-con seminar attendees.

To find out more information about the pre-con seminar agenda, hotel information, and to register, please click: SQLSaturday #107 Pre-Con Registration. There is an early bird registration rate ($88) available through the end of February and seating is limited, so sign up now and save!  The regular rate of $99 will be charged starting March 1.  

If you have already registered for SQLSaturday #107 and want to attend the pre-con, that is great!  If you want to attend both events, please realize that there are two separate registrations…

SQLSaturday #107 Pre-Con Registration (April 20)

SQLSaturday #107 (April 21)

If you need to take your performance tuning skills to the next level, then Kalen Delaney’s Query Plan seminar will be invaluable in developing your knowledge of how SQL Server works and how you can impact (for better or worse) its performance. This is your opportunity to get that knowledge from one of the gurus in our industry!

 

Have Your Say – SQLRally Pre-con Sessions up for Vote!

SQLRally is a PASS-sponsored 2-day training event scheduled May 10-11, 2012, in Dallas, Texas, and hosted by the North Texas SQL Server User Group with support from all the South Central Region PASS Chapters.  For additional in-depth learning opportunities, there will be 2 days of pre-conference sessions (aka pre-cons) offered on May 8 and May 9.  

6 pre-conference sessions have already been selected and the remaining 2 sessions will be decided by community vote. Voting will close on February 9, 2012, at 5pm Central time – so what are you waiting for – go vote now and plan to attend SQLRally Dallas 2012!

Register for the main 2-day event before March 15, 2012, for only $349!

TSQL2sday #026 – Second Chances

What is TSQL2sday? Back in late 2009, Adam Machanic (blog | twitter) had this brilliant idea for a monthly SQL Server blogger event (the origin of TSQL2sday).  This month’s event is hosted by David Howard (blog | twitter) and this month Dave is letting us chose our topic from any of the prior 25 topics! As my first foray into this event wasn’t until the 14^th occurrence, I really like this idea and selected “TSQL2sday #007 Summertime in the SQL” as my second chance topic. Okay, so it is January, but it was 70+ degrees in Houston today, so quite balmy. However, that wasn’t why I chose this topic; I really chose it because this topic was about what is your favorite “hot” feature in SQL Server 2008 or R2. I thought about “updating” the topic to SQL Server 2012, but I’m really not sure yet which new “hot” feature of SQL Server 2012 will turn out to be my favorite – and after 3 years, I definitely know which SQL Server 2008 set of features is my personal favorite – CMS and PBM.

The Central Management Server (CMS) and Policy-Based Management (PBM) features have made the overall management of large numbers of SQL Server instances, well, manageable.

The CMS enables us to organize instances into multiple different classifications based on version, location, etc. We rebuild the CMS on a regular schedule based on the data in our asset management system. This ensures that all DBAs have access to a CMS with all known instances. If you are not familiar with the CMS – it does not grant any access to the instances themselves and connectivity using it only works with Windows Authentication, so there are no security loopholes here.

We then use these CMS groups as input into our various meta-data and compliance collection processes. Approximately 90% of our technical baseline compliance evaluation is accomplished via policies in PBM. We’ve incorporated all of this using the EPM (Enterprise Policy Management) Framework available on Codeplex with a few tweaks of our own to work better in our environment.

If you haven’t yet checked out the CMS and PBM features, I encourage you to do so today. I have two previous blog entries relating to this topic – “Managing the Enterprise with CMS” and “Taking Advantage of the CMS to Collect Configuration Data”.  I’d also highly recommend that you watch the SQL Server MCM Readiness Videos on the Multi-Server Management and PBM topics.

And, it is good to know that by the time this entry is posted – we should be back to our normal 50 degree January weather in Houston!  

Deprecated Features in SQL Server 2012

Earlier in the year, I wrote a series of posts on Deprecated Features with a promise to revisit as the final version of SQL Server “Denali”, now known as SQL Server 2012, neared. With RC0 recently released, now is the time for that review!

To recap, deprecated features are still available in a version, but are targeted for removal in a future version. Thus, you should avoid using these features in any new development work and consider replacing them where currently used as soon as convenient. So without further delay, the features which are still available in SQL Server 2012 Database Engine, but now deprecated include:

Data programmability features which should be replaced with Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) or ASP.NET:

• SOAP/HTTP endpoints with CREATE ENDPOINT (Transact-SQL) and ALTER ENDPOINT (Transact-SQL)
• sys.soap_endpoints (Transact-SQL)
• sys.endpoint_webmethods (Transact-SQL)

Slipstream functionality will go away – sort of. Starting with SQL Server 2012, the command line parameters /PCUSource and /CUSource should be replaced with the Product Update feature (/UpdateSource) which I have previously discussed. Although the old parameters are still valid, I’d switch to the new parameters ASAP as they are much easier to use and maintaining your source is also simplified.  

There are also Database Engine Backup and Restore T-SQL command changes: RESTORE { DATABASE | LOG } WITH [MEDIA]PASSWORD is deprecated. While BACKUP { DATABASE | LOG } WITH PASSWORD and BACKUP { DATABASE | LOG } WITH MEDIAPASSWORD are actually discontinued in SQL Server 2012. These commands have no replacement.

Database Compatibility level 90 and upgrades from SQL Server 2005 will not be supported in the version after SQL Server 2012.  This is in keeping with Microsoft’s stated support model of only supporting 2 down-level versions for upgrades. You should be well aware of this by now, but I’m including it as a reminder for those new to SQL Server version management. For example, SQL Server 2000 (or database compatibility level 80) is not a supported version to upgrade to SQL Server 2012.   

The ability to return results sets from triggers will not be supported post-SQL Server 2012.

As stronger encryption algorithms are now available, encryption using RC4 and RC4_128 has been deprecated. However, decrypting RC4 and RC4_128 has not been deprecated.

Several stored procedures, a global variable, and SET command related to remote servers have been deprecated. It has been recommended for several versions now to replace remote servers with linked servers.  Hopefully you have already done this task.

SET ROWCOUNT for INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE has been replaced by the TOP keyword, so if you have been using SET ROWCOUNT to limit the number of rows affected by your INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statements, you’ll need to switch these to use the TOP keyword instead.

If you’ve been using the table hint HOLDLOCK without parenthesis, then you will need to add the parenthesis in the next release of SQL Server.

On the tools side of things, the SQLMAINT utility has been deprecated with the recommendation to use SQL Server maintenance plans as the replacement.

And if you want to really get a jump on things, along with the list of deprecated features just described for the “next” version of SQL Server (after 2012), you can start eliminating the usage of features listed in “Features Not Supported in a Future Version of SQL Server” – both can be found here:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143729(v=SQL.110).aspx

If you are using the Full-Text feature of SQL Server then you’ll want to check-out the list of deprecated items specific to that feature here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc646010(v=SQL.110).aspx. These include many stored procedures (e.g. sp_fulltext_catalog) which have been replaced with new T-SQL syntax (e.g. CREATE\ALTER).

And, finally, if you are using components other than the Database Engine (i.e. SSAS, SSIS, SSRS), then you’ll need to review the deprecated/discontinued lists for them in their respective Backward Compatibility sections of Books Online.

As I pointed out in Part 3 of my earlier blog series, you can detect most deprecated features by using the SQL Server: Deprecated Features object performance counter and trace events.   A future blog will discuss which previously deprecated features have actually been discontinued in SQL Server 2012 – meaning you will have to address them before upgrading.