I was privileged to have a chat with my buddies over at www.dotnetrocks.com, Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell, episode number 876 (876!). Listen to the most popular internet audio talk show for .NET developers!  Here's the abstract:

Carl and Richard talk to Kevin Kline about the latest features in SQL Server 2012. The conversation starts out talking about the new features that developers will love, like windowing - no need for cursors anymore, you can request a window of records from a set and move easily window-to-window. Kevin also talks about the new column store index that is especially useful with repeating data. There's also a discussion on the role of SQL Server in an increasingly NoSQL world, along with cool new technologies like Hadoop, Cassandra and Hekaton. Kevin closes with an offer of some free tools at SQL Sentry, including Plan Explorer, a tool to help you understand the query plans that SQL Server makes from your queries. Check it out!

Let me know what you think.  Thanks,

-Kevin

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In this column, I want to tell you about one of my favorite aspects of the TPC benchmarks – CHEATING. Keep in mind that I use the term “cheating” in a joking manner with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek.  But I’m also half-serious.  One of the of the things that is great about the TPC benchmarks is that each of the vendors are required to fully describe all of the shortcuts, tweaks, and special operating configurations they use in order to achieve their spectacular performance numbers.  In a sense, the Transaction Processing Counsel requires that all benchmarked platforms declare all of the ways that they cheat in order to achieve peak performance.

...read more...

Many thanks,

-Kevin

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- Google Author

Let's talk about database application benchmarking.

This is a skill set which, in my opinion, is one of the major differentiators between a journeyman-level DBA and a true master of the trade. In this article published in my monthly column at Database Trends & Applications magazine, I'll give you a brief introduction to TPC benchmarks and, in future articles, I'll be telling you how to extract specific pieces of valuable information from the published benchmark results.

But let's get started with an overview … read more.

Many thanks,

-Kevin

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The initial release of Database Lifecycle Management is now available on MSDN.

The site is something called "curated content". This means it's a single consolidated location to look up lots of disparate articles and content, all in one easy to search location. This “curated content view” contains the best content, video, and community-centric information from Microsoft, including topics like:

SQL Server Data Tools

   · Get started with sample projects, code samples

   · Video demos by Gert Drapers (blog)

   · Script common data portability tasks using Sqlpackage.exe

   · Link to the SSDT team blog

SQL Server Management Studio

   · Manage SQL Database using SSMS

   · Backup and restore w/ SQL Azure

   · Migrate local databases to Azure

   · Video demo of hybrid scenarios by Gert Drapers (blog)

Windows Azure SQL Database

   · SQL Database backup and restore

   · Import/export SQL Database

   · Windows Azure training kit

   · Connection management and troubleshooting connections

Enjoy,

-Kevin

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The best emotion to describe how I'm feeling is 'astounded'.  I'm astounded that I'm in such august company to be speaking the SQLIntersection (#iSQL) conference.  Read the blog post from my first SQL Server mentor, Kimberly Tripp, which tells you all about SQLintersection.

Check out this list of speakers:

• Aaron Bertrand, Sr. Consultant, SQL Sentry, Inc. [blog | twitter]
• Andrew J. Kelly, Mentor, SolidQ [blog | twitter]
• Bob Ward, Principal Architect Escalation Engineer, Microsoft [blog | twitter]
• Brent Ozar, Brent Ozar Unlimited [blog | twitter]
• Conor Cunningham, Principal Architect, SQL Server, Microsoft [blog]
• Grant Fritchey, Product Evangelist, Red Gate Software [blog | twitter]
• Jeremiah Peschka, Brent Ozar Unlimited [blog | twitter]
• Joseph Sack, Principal Consultant, SQLskills.com [blog | twitter]
• Kendra Little, Managing Director, Brent Ozar Unlimited [blog | twitter]
• Kevin Kline, Director of Engineering Services, SQL Sentry, Inc. [blog | twitter]
• Kimberly L. Tripp, President/Founder, SQLskills.com [blog | twitter]
• Mat Young, Senior Director of Products, Fusion-io [blog | twitter]
• Paul S. Randal, CEO / Owner, SQLskills.com [blog | twitter]
• Paul White, SQL Kiwi Limited [blog | twitter]
• Steve Jones, Editor, SQLServerCentral.com [blog | twitter]
• Sumeet Bansal, Principal Solutions Architect, Fusion-io [blog | twitter]

 Read the list of SQL Server sessions here.  On top of the list of outstanding sessions to attend, I'll be giving a keynote on Tuesday afternoon. Witness:

So the only thing between the attendees and the booze in the reception hall is our keynote address?!?  Oh yeah, that's going to go down real smooth, isn't it?  I'll last about as long as a puny henchman between James Bond and the villain of the movie.  Sumeet Bansal, from Fusion-IO, will have to survive until the credits roll.  We'll be talking about high performance computing on SQL Server 2012 with an eye towards high availability, AlwaysOn, and Availability Groups.

If you're in Las Vegas, I hope to see you there!  If not, you should consider coming to this excellent conference.

-Kevin

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One of the types of question you get after speaking at a conference about virtualization, like I did at the 2012 PASS Summit with my buddy David Klee (Twitter | Blog), might go down like this:

"Is SQL Server version X supported on hypervisor platform Q?" or something even more specific like "Is SQL Server 2012 supported on VMWare vSphere ESX 4.1 Update 2? Or do I have to upgrade to ESX 5.0?".

Now, when I'm asked a question like this, I usually drool and act like an ape, hoping the the questioner will flee in terror.  If they insist on hanging around to hear a real answer, I now refer them to the Windows Server Catalog site thanks to a tip from my NASCAR buddy and Microsoft MVP, Geoff Hiten (Twitter | Blog).  For some reason, this very useful site is unknown to most - but it provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive information on what Microsoft supports.  Once you've determined which hypervisor you want to check for support, you can simply search the site for your area of interest, say “Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation”.  

Since Microsoft certifies OS's for virtualization platforms, you can by extension be assured that any supported application for that OS is also supported on that virtualization platform.  So, to answer the early question about VMWare VSphere ESX, you'll find the entry for VMWare VSphere ESX 4.1 (Update 2) at http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/item.aspx?idItem=698bb582-b1ca-7124-05e4-256558d39e68&bCatID=1521.

Make sense?

Now, you know the rest of the story about why I drool and make monkey sounds at some conferences. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

-Kevin

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In the same way that the finest presentations involve much more than the simple relaying of information, the finest software demos are much more than just presenting features.  

REMEMBER: The goal of a demo is to INSPIRE the audience to use the software/technology, not to teach them every nuance of software/technology.

I've spent the last 10 years learning how to give good presentations and to give good software demonstrations. Here are several tips to take your software demonstration from informative to masterful:

1. Know your audience

Whenever you start a demo, make sure you have a good idea what the audience is interested in. That way you can focus the attention of the audience upon things that actively engage their imagination. You really, really want the audience to be thinking about how they're going to use the software that you are presenting. If it if you're not presenting on something that they're interested in, they'll mentally disengage. In some cases you'll even see them open their laptops and start to answer emails. That's the last thing in the world that you want to happen.

In many cases, I'll begin a presentation by asking my audience to tell me more about themselves. I want to know how much of their time is spent as a developer, as a DBA, as a designer. If nothing else, I can change the sort of examples that I use to be tailored specifically to the audience that are presenting to.

Truly bad software demos have problems. The code doesn't work. The beta software crashes. The screen shows the dreaded blue screen. But that's one thing. What you really want to avoid, is the truly mediocre software demo. The quickest path to a mediocre software demo is to simply show every feature and explain each in as much detail as you can. It's like those games that sit in our closet that no one likes to play. Most all of these games are ones in which one person takes a turn while everyone else waits. No one has any fun except for the three or four minutes in which it relates directly to them.

2. Start, but only start, with an agenda

It's always a good idea to inform your attendees of what you would like to present. What you present the agenda it's a great idea to confirm that this agenda is what the audience is looking for. Before I learned to do this on a regular basis, I found that my presentation might contain two or three lengthy sections of my software demo which were completely uninteresting to the audience.  The customer is really numbed by this waste of time. It's far better to tell the audience what you are going to tell them.

Here's my routine when I start a demo. Confirm that your agenda is of interest to them and recheck the time constraints of the meeting. Then, get to what they are interested in. This flexibility also provides you the opportunity to inject other software demonstrations that are much more pertinent to your audience. Audiences love a presenter who can think on their feet and are flexible to the interests of the audience.

3. Skip the lengthy intro

This is a aspect of demonstrations and presentations that I struggle with. I worried a lot that I hadn't demonstrated enough credibility with my audience. And so for many years of my technology evangelism role, I spent a lot of time telling the audience about myself and about the company. What I found over time though, is that audiences actually give you an initial dose of credibility. It's up to you to maintain and even enhance that credibility through a strong demo and a good presentation. Better to have a very short introduction and get straight to the meat of the presentation.

Call out - Mouse Cursor Movement: It's especially important to remember in online demos that there is usually a great deal of latency between what you do on your screen and what your audience sees on their screen.  So it's important to remember to MOVE YOUR MOUSE SLOWLY AND THOUGHTFULLY! I've sat in online webcasts, and even in in-person events, where the mouse literally disappeared on one section of the screen and reappeared elsewhere because the presenter was moving their mouse cursor here, there, and everywhere.  If you want the audience to see what you're doing with the mouse cursor, keep it slow.

4. Show what is pertinent

One of the most important things a software evangelist can do is to show the most important and pertinent take away of their software. Let's you are trying to teach an audience about the extreme ROI (return on investment) of a particular kind of business intelligence strategy, it's crucial that you figure out in advance what are the key takeaways that you would like your audience to remember. Typically in audience will only remember two or three very salient points about your demo. If the BI presentation spends the first 30 minutes showing how to build a report but never once mentions ROI, what do you think the audience will remember? Once you know what is pertinent to your audience and what you want the key takeaway to be, you should focus the rest of your energies on building an airtight demo that supports those takeaways.

You will see the inverse of this many times in a mediocre or poor demo. At the end of the demo the audience will feel like they have sat through product training, rather than a call to action that inspires them to use the product. I've sat through demos in which the presenter carefully walk through several different menus, tabs, and wizards. And after 30 minutes of that, I now knew HOW to use the software, but I still didn't know WHY I would use the software.

In the worst cases, showing everything that your software can do may leave the audience feeling that it is too complex, too detailed, or too overwhelming for them to use effectively. Remember that a software demo is not design to train the audience. A software demo is designed to inspire the audience to use your products.

5. Don't get sidelined

We usually get sidelined in our demos by two things: questions from the audience and "technical difficulties" a.k.a. bugs.

Questions from the Audience

It's usually a good sign if your demo is provoking questions from the audience. However, you don't want to demo to turn into free consultation to solve one person's problem. Nor do you want to turn into fact-finding for one very narrow set of interests or to become the arbiter of some sort of political dispute between factions in the audience.

When taking questions, remember to repeat the question to the audience. This ensures that you fully understood the question, that the questioner asked for what they meant, and that if there is any recording going on the question will be picked up by the recording system.

But my typical rule of thumb is to only spend a couple minutes on a single question and questioner. Once a single questioner goes beyond a couple minutes, you can usually tell if you're heading for the sidelines. It's at that point that I asked the questioner if we can take the question off-line and come back to it afterwards so that everyone else can benefit from the time that we have set aside right now.

Technical Difficulties

Another form of sidelining are bugs in the software and outright crashes of your demo environment. Many times this simply can't be avoided. This is especially true if you are demoing a beta version of the software. But there are couple important things to remember if you are sidelined by a bug or crash.

First, mention if you're using a beta and that it might not be fully stable. Also, be sure to mention that the software WAS stable when you prepared the demo. Second, test your demo after conducting a full reboot of your demo environment. I've seen many demos crash because the presenter made other changes in the environment but only tested for the software demonstration itself. Third, Don't draw attention to bugs that you encounter during the demo, especially if they're just cosmetic. It's important not to do things like slap your four head and exclaim "what the hell is that?" If it's a bigger bug that hampers or interferes with functionality, you might state that it's normal functionality is… XYZ. Finally, if you experience a major bug or crash, immediately disconnect the projector or the desktop sharing application. There's nothing worse than seeing a presenter struggle with the bug in front of the entire audience.

6. Hit the jackpot

All good jokes have a punchline. All good action movies have a climax. All good newspaper stories have a headline. Your demo needs to have a jackpot, where the audience can clearly and immediately see how your software pays off.

Let's say you're doing a demo of the new columnstore features in SQL Server 2012. You could spend a lot of time showing the conceptual underpinnings of a columnstore index. You could show the state was to create columnstore indexes, to modify them, to drop them. You could admonish the audience and ways to build read-write systems so that they can easily get data into and out of columnstore indexes.

But what's the real payoff of a columnstore index? It is incredible fast for a particular kind of scenario on SQL Server. So in this example, your jackpot is to show how difficult that scenario is under normal circumstances and then immediately show how easy and fast it is with the columnstore index. Bingo! Your audience is hooked. They immediately see why they want this. There inspired to start using it. Now, they want to figure out how to use it and want to know when and under what conditions they should use.

Are you an SC, technology evangelist, or technology presenter?  What are your tips for a better demo?

-Kevin

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I always seem to get a question or two along the lines of "What's it like on a SQLCruise?" as I present at various conferences, SQL Saturdays, and user group meetings.  Since we just finished up the 2013 Miami SQLCruise, I thought it'd be a good time to recap so that you can judge for yourself if you'd ever want to do it yourself.  Personally, I think that Tim Ford (Twitter | Blog), together with his wife Amy, are doing better than ever in making the cruise both a top-quality learning experience and fantastic social experience.  I've heard from many attendees that they learned enough in the first day or two to make the whole trip worthwhile and, keep in mind, some of these attendees paid for the trip out of their own pocket.

SQLCruise Experience

Now that I've told you about the grueling educational side of SQLCruise, did I mention that we do all of this ON A CRUISE SHIP IN THE CARIBBEAN?!? The cruise ships are, if you will, an enormous Vegas hotel on the water.  There are casinos, a constant parade of entertainment, live music, comedy, pools and water slides, discos and dancing, live game shows - the works.  Ask Neil Hambly (Twitter | Blog) about the dancing!

SQLCruise Cost

Another, less tangible benefit of the expense of the SQLCruise is that the instructors are never unable to answer your questions, compared to many training centers whose trainers have never actually had a career built around the topic they're teaching.  It's a huge difference.