This document provides information about a presentation given by Victor Isakov on the benefits of upgrading to SQL Server 2008 R2 for businesses. The presentation was given to the Sydney Business & Technology User Group on July 28, 2010. It outlines Victor Isakov's background and expertise. It also discusses various aspects of upgrading to SQL Server 2008 R2 such as licensing, new features, changes for database administrators, and upgrade methodologies.

1. Sydney Business & Technology User Group
http://www.sbtug.com
http://www.facebook.com/SBTUG
SQL Server 2008 R2 – The Business
Benefits
Victor Isakov
victor@sqlserversolutions.com.au
Copyright © 2010 by Victor Isakov

2. Abstract
Victor Isakov will be taking us through the benefits
of SQL Server 2008 R2 for business.
Victor is a world renowned SQL Server expert,
author, one of the few Microsoft Certified Masters
and the only Microsoft Certified Architect in
Australia. As a consultant and trainer, Victor deals
with hundreds of business and corporate SQL Server
sites each year. In this session he will outline the
main features of R2 and highlight the benefits for
businesses looking at upgrading..
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

3. Speaker
• Victor Isakov is a Database Architect / Trainer / SQL Ranger who provides
consulting and training services to various organizations in the public,
private and NGO sectors globally, and been involved in different capacities
at various international events and conferences. Victor specializes in:
– Still does “high-end” SQL Server training
– Performance tuning and optimization
– “Health-checks” / “Risk Assessments” / review of SQL Server infrastructure
– Architecting / re-factoring database solutions
– Assessing the effectiveness of your outsourced services / licensing
– Consolidating / upgrading SQL Server infrastructure
• Blog: www.victorisakov.com
• Email: victor@sqlserversolutions.com.au
• Website: www.sqlserversolutions.com.au
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

4. SQL Server Training
• Victor Isakov is the only Microsoft Certified Trainer who
is also a Microsoft Certified Architect globally
• Been training SQL Server since version 6.0
• Has both deep technical knowledge and extensive
consulting/product experience
• Specializes in customized training:
• Database Administration
• Database Design and Optimization
• Performance Tuning / High-Availability
• Worked with Microsoft on SQL Server Certification
• Write and validate exam items
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

5. Questions…
• How many SQL Server instances?
– SQL Server 2000?
– SQL Server 2005?
– SQL Server 2008?
• How many databases exist?
• Do you have a testing harness?
– Performance Testing?
– Functional Testing?
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

6. More Questions…
• For each database:
– Is it still being used?
• Who’s using it?
• What client applications?
– Was it developed in-house?
• Who is the owner?
– Who are the developers?
» Is it documented?
» What are the external-dependencies?
» What are the cross-database dependencies?
– Does the vendor support an upgrade?
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

7. So… You’re Here Because You’re…
• Installing a new instance of SQL Server
• Upgrading existing SQL Server instance
• Interested in the Visual Studio 2010 session
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

8. Upgrading SQL Server
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

9. Upgrade Methodologies
• “Wing it and see” (Hope for the best…)
• More structured approach
– Assess environment
– Determine pre-upgrade tasks
– Determine post-upgrade tasks
– Determine upgrade strategy
– Determine resource requirements
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

10. Upgrade Strategy
• Major Decision Point
– In-place Upgrade
– Side-by-side Migration
• SQL Server Upgrade Advisor
• Strongly consider going to x64 architecture
• Should have post-upgrade validation strategy
– “Correctness”
– “Performance”
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

11. Agenda
• Executive Summary
• Licensing
• New Features
• Changes For DBAs
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

12. Executive Summary
• It’s all about benefits versus risks
• Dependent on your existing SQL Server
infrastructure and how it is managed
• Do not aim for an improvement in
performance because of an upgrade
• Major cost will be in time/effort
• Watch out for technology dependencies
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

13. Product Support Lifecycle
• “Extended Support includes paid support (support that is charged on an
hourly basis or per incident), security update support at no additional
cost, and paid hotfix support.”
• “To receive hotfix support, an Extended Hotfix Support contract must be
purchased within the first 90 days following the end of the Mainstream
Support phase.”
• “Microsoft will not accept requests for warranty support, design changes,
or new features during the Extended Support phase.”
Product Mainstream Extended Support
Support Retired Retired
SQL Server 2000 08/04/2008 09/04/2013
SQL Server 2005 12/04/2011 12/04/2016
SQL Server 2008 14/01/2014 08/01/2019
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

14. Editions
• Datacenter
• Enterprise
• Standard
• Web
• Workgroup
• Express
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

15. Datacenter Edition
• CPU limit dependent on O/S
• Maximum memory dependent on O/S
• Supports a SQL Server utility control point
with a maximum of 200 managed instances of
SQL Server
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

16. Enterprise Edition
• 8 CPUs
• 2TB RAM
• Supports a SQL Server utility control point
with a maximum of 25 managed instances of
SQL Server
• Virtualization licensing has changed!*
– Can now only run 4 VMs
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

17. Standard Edition
• 4 CPUs
• 64GB RAM
• Now supports backup compression
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

18. Express Edition
• 1 CPU
• 1GB RAM
• 10GB database size
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

19. List Price (USD)
• About a 20% price increase from SQL Server
2008
Edition List Price (USD)
Standard $ 7,499
Enterprise $28,749
Datacenter $57,498
Parallel Data Warehouse $57,498
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

20. Licensing
• From the SQL Server 2008 R2 Licensing Quick Reference
– “If your existing SQL Server License is covered by Software
Assurance (SA), you are automatically licensed to upgrade to the
corresponding SQL Server 2008 R2 edition.”
– “If your existing SQL Server License is not covered by SA, you
must purchase a new full license for the SQL Server 2008 R2
edition you want.”
– “Each Server License for SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise permits
you to run the software in up to four (4) OSEs (physical and/or
virtual).”
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

21. Licensing FAQ
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

22. Random Quiz
INTERMISSION
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

23. Everybody Wants This…

24. But what is worse than this?
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

25. A Half-Baked Cake!
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

26. New Features
• Yes… It is a BI release
– PowerPivot for Excel
– Report Builder 3.0
– Master Data Management
• Complex Event Processing
– Stream Insight
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

27. PowerPivot for Excel (Sharepoint)
• Part of Microsoft’s managed self-service BI
strategy
• Requires Office 2010 stack
– Sharepoint 2010
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

28. PowerPivot for Excel
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

29. Report Builder 3.0
• Familiar Office
Interface
• Rich Visualizations
• PowerPivot data
source
• SharePoint list data
source
• Report Part Gallery
for “grab and go”
report design
experience
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

30. Master Data Management
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

31. Master Data Management
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

32. Complex Event Processing
• Complex Event Processing (CEP) is the continuous and incremental
processing of event streams from multiple sources based on
declarative query and pattern specifications with near-zero latency.
Database Applications Event-driven Applications
Query Paradigm Ad-hoc queries or requests Continuous standing queries
Latency Seconds, hours, days Milliseconds or less
Data Rate Hundreds of events/sec Tens of thousands of events/sec or
more
Model
request Event
output
input stream
response stream
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

33. CEP Use Cases
• Manufacturing • Financial Services
– Sensor on plant floor – Stock & news feeds
– React through device – Algorithmic trading
controllers – Patterns over time
– Aggregated data – Super-low latency
– 10,000 events/sec – 100,000 events /sec
• Web Analytics • Utilities (Power)
– Click-stream data – Energy consumption
– Online customer behaviour – Outages
– Page layout – Smart grids
– 100,000 events /sec – 100,000 events/sec
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

34. Microsoft’s CEP Solution
Data Sources, Operations, Assets, Feeds, Sensors, Devices
Input Input Output
Data Streams Data Streams Data Streams
CEP Engine
Monitor Mine Manage
f(x) f'(x)
& & &
Record Design Benefit
g(y) h(x,y)
CEP Engine
Operational Data Results f(x) g(y)
Store & Archive f'(x) h(x,y)
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

35. StreamInsight
• Platform from Microsoft for continuous and incremental processing
of event streams from multiple sources based on declarative query
and pattern specifications with low latency
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

36. CEP Event Streams
• A stream is a possibly infinite sequence of events
– Insertions of new events
– Changes to event durations
– Examples: time series sensor data, log entries
• Stream characteristics:
– Event/data arrival patterns
• Steady rate with end-of-stream indication
Examples: files, tables
• Intermittent, random, or in bursts
Example: retail scanners, web, weather telemetry
– Out of order events
• Order of arrival of events does not match the order of their
application timestamps
• CEP engine does the heavy lifting for you when dealing with out-
of-order data
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

37. CEP Query Features
• Operators over streams
– Calculations (PROJECT)
– Correlation of streams from different data sources (JOIN)
– Check for absence of activity with a data source (EXISTS)
– Selection of events from streams (FILTER)
– Stream partitioning (GROUP & APPLY)
– Aggregation (SUM, COUNT, …)
– Ranking and heavy hitters (TOP-K)
– Temporal operations: hopping window, sliding window
• Extensibility – to add new domain-specific operators
• Queries are written over specific event types
– They can be evaluated on all data sources with the same event type
• Support for streaming data, reference data (lookup), and historical
data (replay)
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

38. CEP Deployment Alternatives
Web servers
• Event processing engines are Data Sources Sensors
deployed at multiple places on
different scales
• At the edge – close to the data CEP
CEP Feeds
source Devices
• In the mid-tier – consolidate Aggregation & CEP
related data sources, Correlation
• In the data center – historical CEP
archive, mining, large scale CEP CEP
correlation.
CEP CEP CEP
CEP CEP for lightweight processing and
filtering Complex Analytics &
CEP for aggregation and correlation Mining
CEP
of in-flight events
CEP for complex analytics including
CEP
historical data
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

39. For the DBA (DBD)
• Backup compression in Standard Edition
• Support for 256 logical processors
• Unicode compression
• SQL Server Utility
• Data-Tier Application
• Live Migration
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

40. Support for 256 Logical Processors
• Requires Datacenter Edition
• Default MAXDOP = 64
• New Paradigm
– CPU Groups
• Internal locking structures had to be re-
written
– Can still get lock-hash key collisions!
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

41. Support for 256 Logical Processors
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

42. Unicode Compression: Problem
• SQL Server Uses UCS-2 encoding
– NCHAR and NVARCHAR data always take 2 bytes
of storage
– 1 byte wasted for most deployed locales
– Existing ROW compression ineffective
– PAGE compression only helps for exact match
• Competition
– Oracle supports UTF-8 encoding
– DB/2 supports UTF-8 and Unicode compression
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

43. Unicode Compression: Solution
• Use standard SCSU compression technique
– http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr6/tr6-4.html
• No application change needed
• Compression Achieved
SCSU UTF-8
Locale 0.5 0.5
Japanese .85 1.0
Korean 1.0 1.0
Turkish .52 .53
German .5 .5
Vietnamese 0.61 0.68
Hindi 0.5 1.0
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

44. Unicode Compression: Upgrade
• ROW compression enabled in SQL2008
– No database changes when upgraded
– Unicode value compressed only if it saves space. It
happens when:
• An existing value is updated
• A new row is inserted
• Index is rebuilt with ROW or PAGE compression
• PAGE compression enabled in SQL2008
– Same as with ROW compression
• No changes needed to existing scripts and DDL
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

45. SQL Server Utility
• “Provide administrators
a holistic view of SQL
Server resource health
through an instance of
SQL Server that serves
as a utility control point
(UCP). ”
– SQL Instances
– Data tier applications
– Database files
– Storage volumes
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

46. Utility Control Point (UCP)
• UCP provides a consolidated view of resource
health collected from managed instances of SQL
Server in the SQL Server Utility
• Each managed SQL Server instance configuration
and performance data to the UCP every 15
minutes
• Metrics
– CPU utilization
– Database file utilization
– Storage volume utilization
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

47. Utility Control Point
• Dashboard
• Identify
consolidation
opportunities
• Drill-down to
detailed views
• Simple UI for
policy
adjustments
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

48. UCP Requirements
• UCP / Managed Instances Requirements
– SQL Server 10.50 or higher
– Single Windows domain /domains with two-way
trusts
– Service accounts must have read permission to AD
• Additional UCP Requirements
– Datacenter or Enterprise Edition
– Microsoft recommends hosting UCP on case-
sensitive SQL Server instance
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

49. Data-Tier Application (DAC)
• The Data-tier Application packages database schema with
deployment requirements
• A Data-tier Application package (DACPAC) can be created
in Visual Studio 2010
– Can be extracted from existing applications
– Can define policies
• This integration enables a single unit of deployment for
DBAs to deploy database applications to available servers
that meet deployment criteria.
– Helps significantly streamline deployments, moves and
upgrades by reducing the amount of trial and error associated
with typical database application deployments
• Can be deployed to SQL Server 2008 R2 or SQL Azure
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

50. Data-Tier Application (DAC)
Management Studio
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

51. DAC Limitations
• Not all database objects are supported
– CLR objects
– Service Broker
– Partitioning
– Security
• Smells a lot like SQL Azure to me…
• Upgrading DACPAC is a side-by-side process
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

52. DACPAC Upgrade
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

53. Database Deployment Lifecycle
SQL Server Management Studio
SQL Server Management Studio 3
5
Handoff
to Dev
6
Make Changes,
Create policies
4
Reverse Visual Studio 2010
DBA Engineer DBA
DAC
DBA
Deploy /
Hand-off to DBA Upgrade DAC
Create
Control Control
Control
Point, Point
Point
Compile
Developer + Build
2 7
Enroll
Instances,
Register DACs .dacpac
Finance Finance
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
Managed Server Managed Server
User Group 2010
Group Group

54. Hyper-V Live Migration
• Requires Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V
• Cluster Shared Volumes
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

55. Hyper-V Live Migration
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

56. Business Benefits
• SQL Server 2008 R2 is a BI release
• Business benefits dependent on how quickly you
can leverage new functionality
– PowerPivot
– Rest of new features predominantly effect operational
/ infrastructure costs
• Cost of upgrade versus new installation
• Watch out for “hidden” costs
• Recommend you spend time/effort to “get your
shop in order”
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010

57. Q&A
• Questions?
• Email: victor@sqlserversolutions.com.au
• Blog: www.victorisakov.com
• Website: www.sqlserversolutions.com.au
Sydney Business & Technology 28th July
User Group 2010