Paul's Down-Home Page

Clusters are like nuclear weapons: they’re expensive; they’re dangerous if misdeployed; people who don’t have them frequently envy those who do, and they offer some key advantages that aren’t easily matched by other technologies. (Also, they can cause significant amounts of fallout.)

David Berlind asks “Who broke the Apple news?” He points out that the Wall Street Journal wasn’t the first to break the story, as Steve Jobs claimed during his WWDC keynote. However, Berlind credits C|Net’s June 3 story. However, more than a month beforehand, Paul Thurrott broke the story in this April 26 column, although he didn’t cite sources until May 23rd– the same day the WSJ printed their story. I’m disappointed to see the widespread lack of recognition for Thurrott, because he was the original person to break the story. And no, saying that David Coursey predicted this in August 2002 doesn’t count as prior art, since that was a prediction and not a report of the actual transition.

{ed: updated to add a trackback to Berlind’s original article}

From the “sounds dirty, but isn’t” department, the newest security threat to corporate America: pod slurping. Abe Usher wrote a small executable that can be run from an iPod connected to a PC. When run, slurp will find and copy all of the document files it sees in subdirectories of c:\documents and settings. I hate it when that happens.

Scoble’s raving about how sexy the new Lenovo Thinkpad X41 is. He’s right, but here’s the weird thing: where’s Lenovo? In Ballmer’s keynote yesterday, the X41 was on stage for a total of about 90 seconds. Instead of showing it, it got a brief mention and then Ballmer took it off-stage. The script surrounding its appearance sounded like a bad TV commercial. This would have been a perfect opportunity to showcase what makes the X41 special, or at least to include it in a demo of some kind. We’ve had a great deal of success including the Tablet in our line-of-business demos; for example, BJ Holtgrewe could have showed his stuff on a Tablet and then disconnected it to roam around the stage, just to highlight his claims about what Maestro and the Outlook managed-code support in Visual Studio could do. I know that IBM’s former Thinkpad marketing folks now work for Lenovo, but suddenly they seem to have gone tone-deaf. What’s up with that?
Update: I spent a few minutes playing with an X41 Tablet at IBM’s booth. Terrific form factor, and it has the same solid feel as my T41 (and its predecessor T30, and the T20 I had before that, and the 600E I had before that). I think IBM’s going to sell a lot of these.

Opening riff: Samantha Bee interviewing people in the audience. Medium-funny. We all want to give information workers a wedgie!
Paul Flessner onstage, “interviewed” by Bee. “This morning, he’s the Techie Show’s special senior connected systems correspondent.”
Flessner: IT’s a tough job. Budget’s always cut. Clinton imitation: “I feel your pain.” Bee: “Can you honestly echo his quote that he didn’t inhale?” Big laughs. Funny story about accidentally powering down a rack of 3380s.
Now Flessner’s presentation starts. “You might be asking yourself, what’s a connected system?” Interesting slide showing progression of connectivity from first telegraph msg to first transoceanic cables to radio and TV to ICs and the Internet to the 2000 release of .NET.
Talking about the change in business application architecture from mainframe (monolithic, multi-function) to mini (monolithic, multi-function, with separate client). Wrong factoring for large-scale async applications. Refactor multiple functions of monolithic apps into cloud of web services, each offering well-defined independent services that are atomic and don’t share context or state. Clouds of composite applications that federate data (“Federated data– I’m not advocating it, but it’s sort of a fact of life”) and identity. “I’m not saying that you have to throw out your existing systems and rewrite… but it is something to think about. Think hard about breaking down into atomic services.”
Three pillars: highest developer productivity, mission critical abilities, better business decisions. Have to enable both data and process.
Update: SQL Server 2005: integrated with VS and .NET to deliver integrated debugging / development. “No one in the world who wants to ship SQL Server 2005 more than me.” Develop and debug code on client, midtier, and back-end from directly within VS. CLR now deeply embedded in SQL Server. Service broker (async queuing and messaging), cache sync, native XML database support. [ed: nothing new here that I can see, and I don’t know much about SQL Server 2005]
Update: BizTalk Server 2006. Integrated with SQL and VS 2005, one-click deployment. Big win: simplified setup [ed: that’s one of the biggest pains with BizTalk 2003– it’s extremely difficult to set up and get going] “You’re going to get a lot of stuff for free in terms of ?? or SQL Server”.

Announcing: RFID infrastructure from Microsoft. [ed: I got it wrong yesterday– I thought the demo was supposed to be yesterday– no demo yet, though] Partnership between Symbol, Printronix, and MS. No timeframe; “you should sort of expect it in the 2006 timeframe.”
Update: Visual Studio and VS Team System. [ed: this is super cool and is MS’ attempt to kick Rational in the butt] Load testing, profiling, test coverage, other QA tools integrated into a “more sophisticated and more scalable” source code control service. “We’re super excited about it… A lot of partners already plugging in and extending this”.
50-75% code reduction for most scenarios of web dev and smart client dev. Better perf and offline experience for web apps; ClickOnce for smart client apps. CacheSync provides local caching of back-end data under developer control. “It will be difficult to buy a non-64-bit machine in, say, 24 months.”
Demo: Brian Keller, PM for Visual Studio. His mom’s in the audience! Demoing app showing counts of attendees in various locations via RFID. Now showing graph of number of attendees vs number of proctors in hands-on labs. [ed: cool, but scary; this isn’t really anonymous even though they keep saying it is] VS 2005 supports smart tags [ed: great feature!] Large library of “code snippets” “that you don’t have to develop or test”. Demoing RFID monitoring of a piece of equipment as it moves around.
[ed: I see something that looks like a BattleBot on stage] Sure enough, that’s Flessner’s missing hardware. It runs on the .NET Compact Framework. The ‘bot is delivering a Portable Media Center. “First RFID raffle ever”. [ed: I didn’t win]
Announcing: $50K Connected Systems Developer Competition. No real details.
Video featuring Xerox application developers. [ed: Borrring.]
Update: Samantha Bee again demoing the SQL Server 2005 Technical Benefits Translator. First benefit (availability): “Downtime is for suckers” [ed: my new email signature!] Second benefit (security): “Hey, hackers, bite me!” Third (scalability): “SQL Server 2005 is like spandex pants.” “No matter how big you get, they still fit!”
Update: Flessner’s back. Safe synchronous database mirroring or async replication. Online indexing, fine-grained online undo/repairs.
Talking about security now. “I apologize for [Slammer] again today.” Showing critical security bulletin count of SQL vs Oracle. 2002: 11 for MS vs 20 for Oracle; 2003: 2 vs 13; 2004: 1 vs 74; 2005: 0 vs 2. [ed: source for this is vendor sites, osvdb, and Secunia]
Key security measures: surface area reduction, enhanced security (native encryption, cert mgmt, password policy enforcement, auditing & authZ). SQL Best Practices Analyzer ([ed: great! the Exchange BPA is a terrific tool].)
Rockin’ TPC numbers: $5.38 TPC-C and $54 TPC-H (1 TB), compared to $6.49 and $119 for SQL 2000. Same hardware for SQL 2000, SQL 2005, and Oracle: Oracle is $8.33 TPC-C and $68 TPC-H. [ed: lots of fine print on this slide detailing the exact HW config and results]
Update: Francois Ajenstat, GPM for SQL Server, coming onstage to demo. Cool moving-bars perfmon application showing SQL 2000 vs SQL 2005 on identical HW. 64-bit version of SQL 2005 on Win 2003 x64. [ed: No surprise: much better perf due to much larger cache.] Here comes the BattleBot; it’s attacking the network switch that connects the SQL Server 2005 32-bit demo machine. [ed: it’s all pyro, no actual metal was bent] Failover worked well, though.
Update: Samantha Bee again with the head of “None of Your Business”. “We follow the IBM/Oracle model… You pay to put information into a database, and if you really need it back, you pay to see it again.”
Update: Back to Flessner. “Business activity monitoring is to business what BI is to data.” Integrates SQL reporting services and “Office Scorecard Accelerator“. Integrate, then analyze, then report. Announcement: SQL Server Reporting Services will be available in all SQL 2005 editions.
Demo: Donald Farmer, GPM for SQL Server. Stopwatch demo: Farmer has 8 minutes to do some reporting. Data mining over the output of a conditional split. [ed: Lots of clicking, so I can’t follow step by step.] Prediction value of data seems low– 0.26 or thereabouts. Showing wizard for creating report based on analysis. Flessner: “Kind of ugly, isn’t it?” Farmer: “It does look like a report done in 5 minutes, doesn’t it? Typical real-world scenario: he asked me to clean his dirty data, I did it in half the estimated time, and he’s still not happy.” Lots of applause and laughter.
Now showing visual report builder to prettify the report appearance.
Announcing: SQL Server 2005 launches week of November 7. BizTalk 2006 CTP starts now; SQL Server 2005 CTP starts June. Free Standard Edition of SQL Server Standard Edition for all TechEd attendees.
Gartner revenue market share numbers 2004: IBM 34.1%, Oracle 33.7%, Microsoft 20%. “sort of an option to port to Linux; haven’t discussed that with Bill lately”. IDC’s unit share numbers: IBM has 7%, Oracle has 25%, Microsoft has 41%. “We took share” from IBM and Oracle. “How does IBM have the #1 revenue share and the lowest unit share? Let’s take a look.” Enterprise unit share: 9% IBM, 29% Oracle, 34% Microsoft.
Pricing: base product, 1 CPU, base price for enterprise edition of base product. Oracle $40K, IBM $25K, Microsoft $25K. Upcharges for manageability, availablity, clustering, BI, and multi-core. Final price for dual-core with all options: $232K for Oracle, $330K for IBM on AIX (they don’t charge for multi-core on x86/x64).
Announcing: SQL Server Migration Assistant. Automates Oracle-to-SQL Server migration. Claimes to reduce manual effort by over 80%. Contest: most exciting Oracle conversion wins a custom chopper.