Preparing a Business Case Upgrade to present to the Boss

Preparing a Business Case Upgrade to present to the Boss

• Darryl Burling
• Product Manager, SQL Server
• Microsoft

Agenda

• Fake Company
• Fake Scenario requirements
• 8 Business Drivers
• Justifying an upgrade

Company Overview

• Supplies, sells and maintains farm equipment for rural customers (farmers, etc)
• Customers across New Zealand
• 400 staff
• Sales reps based in North and South Islands
• Annual Revenue $125m
• Customers on 3 year supply agreements and some on no agreements (cash basis)

Scenario Requirements

• Customer Management
• Used by 350 of 400 staff in the company
• Must be highly available
• Deployment config.
  • Dual CPU Primary Server
  • Single CPU Mirror Server
  • Single CPU DR Server
• Requires support
• Features required
  • Snapshots
  • Partitioning
  • Reporting
  • OLAP
  • Geographic data
  • Photo storage
  • Compression
  • Encryption (incl. backup)

The Contenders

• MySQL (by Sun)
• Oracle
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008

1. Tangible Costs
   1. MySQL

i. $0 upfront costs ii. $53,910 for 3 years iii. Support and maintenance iv. NZ$101,835.99

1. 1. Oracle 11g Enterprise Edition

i. Enterprise license $47,500 per processor ii. Snapshots $5,800 iii. Partitioning $11,500 iv. Reporting $23,000 v. OLAP $23,000 vi. Geographic data (locator now built in) vii. Etc… viii. Total product $244,600 ix. Maintenance $53,912 per annum x. Total over 3 years $406,036 xi. NZ$767,002

1. 1. SQL Server 2008 Enterprises

i. Total product $113,275 ii. Software Assurance $28,318 iii. Total over 3 years NZ$198,232.27

1. Skills Availability
   1. How easy is it to get people to work on it? Available workforce.
   2. How much do these people costs?
   3. How easy is it to solve short term skills shortages?
   4. Do people want to work with the product?
   5. What are the up-skill requirements if someone leaves?

Salary Comparison (itsalaries.co.nz – results based on a search in Wellington for a DBA by keyword)

• Oracle
  • Median Base Salary $93,250
  • Upper quartile $99,500
  • Lower quartile $85,000
• SQL Server
  • Median $78,000
  • Upper quartile $110,500
  • Lower quartile $70,500
• MySQL/Open Source DBA
  • Median $0

1. Customer requirements
   1. Will it meet the customer requirements?
   2. Watch out for unspoken requirements
   3. If it doesn’t fit, what will it cost to make it meet the requirements?

Customer requirements

• MySQL doesn’t meeting requirements

1. Third party products and services
   1. How many companies are extending this product?
   2. Are there any specialist partners…?

1. Standards Compliance
   1. ANSI
   2. WS*

Considerations for business methodology

• Microsoft shop or heterogeneous?
• Existing skills or hire in new ones?
• Existing installations or green fields?
• Interoperability – will it work with existing systems?

1. User functionality requirements
   1. User friendliness
   2. Discoverability
   3. Consistent user experience
   4. Think users – not necessarily customer
   5. Users should not hate the product!

i. Should be easier to use, faster to get results

1. 1. Ease of administration

Functionality issues – Oracle

• Growth by acquisition
• Add on products
• Add hoc user experience
• Add hoc management tools
• Some management tools are poor quality (apparently)

Functionality issues – SQL Server

• Integration at each version
• Included in product
• Integrates with other products

1. Timeliness
   1. If I order it today, how long until users can be productive on it?
   2. If I need to extend it – how much ability do I have to modify the solution?
   3. How quickly can problems be solved?
   4. It may not be a good fit if: it looks complex; it suffers from poor quality.

1. Life expectancy
   1. How long will the vendor be around
   2. How long will they support the product for?
   3. When is the next version likely to be out?
   4. Is there a migration path for the next version?
   5. How easy is it to upgrade to the next version?

Summary

1. Tangible costs: $622k vs 200k
2. Skills availability: Good vs great
3. Customer requirements: met – complex vs simple
4. Third party products and services: good
5. Standards and methodology fit: Good vs great
6. User Functionality requirements: YMMV
7. Timeliness: Ok vs good
8. Life expectancy: OK vs good

Why move from SQL 2000 to 2008?

• Reporting
  • Out of the box
  • Rich controls
  • End user report builder
  • Scale out capabilities
• Security
  • Encryption (column and database)
  • External Key management
  • SDLC
• Storage efficiency
  • Filestream
  • Sparse columns
  • Compression
• Integration server
  • High performance
  • Large scale ETL
  • Scheduled jobs
• Performance
  • 20-35% improvement
• Management
  • Policy based management
  • Configuration servers
  • SCOM (system centre operations manager) monitoring
  • Powershell
  • Online indexing
• Auditing
  • Compliance management
• Partitioning
  • Table partitioning (05)
  • Index and view partitioning (08)
• Analysis Server
  • You get it

Migrating DTS to SSIS 2008

Migrating DTS to SSIS 2008

• Myles Matheson
• Solution Specialist
• Microsoft New Zealand

Session Objectives

• Explain the migration story for SSIS 2008
• Describe tools and practices for migration
• Provide guidance for current engagements

Key takeaways

• We will not break existing installs
• This is not the next version of DTS – it’s the first version of a whole new product
• Migration is not perfect
• Redesign is a better option

Agenda

• From DTS to SSIS
• Upgrade Experience
• Support for Migration
• Migrating Packages

Simple Data Transformation

• DTS Data Transformation and SSIS Data Flow objects models don’t map 1-1.
• Goal: Migrate all packages created by the Import/Export Wizard and any others with equivalent functionality

Quiz:

1. What’s the first thing to do before a migration? Run Upgrade Advisor
2. What happens when SSIS Migration Wizard can’t upgrade a DTS package? It will be encapsulated and called back from a legacy DTS runtime.
3. What else should be first? Get funding/permission!

ODBC Provider Bug?

ODBC Provider Bug?

James Hippolite Friday 28-Nov-08 09:45	Has anybody heard of a bug in the ODBC provider for Excel where, if a column has 10 NULLS in a row, then the entire column comes in as NULL?
Paul Bibby Friday 28-Nov-08 09:57	Don’t know if this is similar to your experience ? http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2006-08/msg00457.html
Leigh Hunt Friday 28-Nov-08 10:40	I ran in to I think the exact same issue a number of times years ago, importing mixed field types from Excel into Access, using the JET driver. I think Paul's answer is probably the one your after, especially the links to http://www.dicks-blog.com/archives/2004/06/03/external-data-mixed-data-types/ and http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;257819. However, I encountered mine about 8 years ago, using older versions of the software, so thought I'd post it here incase the above solutions don't fix it for you... (I notice one article states that the MaxScanRows argument doesn't work in a connection string - well it certainly works in the registry: I changed the following entries in the registry: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Jet\3.5\Engines\Text] "MaxScanRows"=dword:0001869f "ImportMixedTypes"="Text" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Jet\4.0\Engines\Text] "MaxScanRows"=dword:0001869f "ImportMixedTypes"="Text" After this, all imports would work fine for me. Cheers, Leigh.

Microsoft Unplugged November Session

Session 1:

• Next Generation Client Windows and Web
• WPF 3.5 SP1 and Silverlight 2
• JD Trask (from Mindscape): http://blog.bluecog.co.nz/
• 1:30pm to 3:00pm
• Of limited use to me here in Telecom, although I will be looking closely into http://www.codeplex.com/familyshow/ to see how they mocked up that Geneology Tree.

Session 2:

• Visual Studio Tips and Tricks
• Increase your Productivity
• Kirk Jackson (from Xero): http://feeds.feedburner.com/pageofwords
• 3:30pm to 5:00pm
• Very entertaining presenter. I've seen this particular talk 3 times now, and each time I learn something new, but can in no manner memorise everything that was said: too much information!

Microsoft Developer Feedback Forum

Attended this yesterday (Thursday 13 November) morning. Contents confidential, although we were recorded! I gave some feedback on developer issues:

• I hate the Ribbon (Ivon Towlson loves it).
• Generally very pleased with development suite.
• I wish the Membership Provider didn't insist on utilising a password all the time. This is because, in an Intranet scenario, I can ascertain the Windows login ID of the user (authentication). Therefore, all I need to do in order to verify whether the user is allowed into one of my apps (authorisation) is to check off their name from a list. No passwords required. But because that's how the Membership Provider is structured, therefore I can't use it.
• I use SubSonic as my ORM of choice, although I understand with the demise of LINQ 2 SQL, that the Entities Framework will be (soon) the ORM solution offered by Microsoft.
• I'm not involved in licensing of Microsoft Products here at Telecom, for which I am truely grateful, although I did have input into the decision to continue receiving DVDS as part of MSDN. Starting from the next annual subscription, I will be reversing my earlier recommendation and instead choose to download all MSDN content that we require.
• I highly rate and highly value the contribution of Microsoft to the establishment and support of the .NET community events. For me, these are career enhancing opportunities to meet with like-minded individuals, learn from them, socialise with them, and give back.
• On the question of Trust, I do not trust Microsoft to stick with any one technology, but to constant move with the industry adoption options. I do trust them to be around for a number of years. I don't trust them to fully support NZ (e.g. with Data Centres) any time soon. I do trust them to innovate continually (even if that means they hire innovative individuals like Rob Conery).
• One idea I didn't voice, because it was uncalled-for and unmerited was this. With a new socialist president in America, will he force monopolies like Microsoft to split up? NZ did it to Telecom, so don't tell me it doesn't happen!

User Group PDC Event

From Kirk:

Hi, Thanks for RSVPing for tonight's meeting! This is just a quick reminder that we start slightly earlier than usual (5:30pm), and our venue is different (Mezzanine Room, Level 1, Wellington Library). The room is just next to the lift on the first floor, before you go into the library. It's looking like we're going to have a whirl-wind 2 hours going through some of the cool stuff from the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) last week: - Cloud services / Azure Chris Auld - Silverlight 2.0 James Newton-King - New VB.NET features James Hippolite - Sharepoint Chan Kulathilake - Windows 7 Mark Orange - Oslo and modeling Owen Evans - New C# 4.0 features Kirk Jackson I also have a few prizes to give away, so make sure you get there on time! For those of you that have invited your kids, there will be a prize or two for them too. Cheers, see you tonight, Kirk

From James:

My presentation was on VB.NEXT, the Next Version of VB.NET. My slides are here: http://cid-a93b6100e328706d.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Presentations/VB.Next.pps I covered the following topics: Where is Visual Basic Headed? Co-Development with C# New Features Future Trends The New Features I covered were: Automatic Properties Multi-Line Lambdas (and Sub Lambda with PLINQ) Generic Variance (too hard, left this for Kirk!) Dynamic Language Runtime Interop Collection Initializers Array Literals Implicit Line Continuations Embedded Primary Interop Assemblies

SQL Server 2008 DBA Training

Event:	Microsoft In-Person Training Forum
Venue:	Brewery Bar, Corner of Taranaki and Cable Streets on the Waterfront, Wellington
Start:	Tuesday 4 November 2008 @ 8:30am
End:	Tuesday 4 November 2008 @ 4:30pm
Audience:	IT Implementer, IT Professional
Overview:	The SQL Server DBA Tarining Forum is designed to help DBA's get up to speed on some of the key featuers and strategies they will face when considering deploying and migrating to SQL Server 2008.  During the forum we covered topics that included: what's new in SQL Server 2008 Architectural considerations for SQL Server 2008 Migration strategies tips and tricks making the most of new features such as spatial data auditing and more...
Presenter:	Jeremy Boyd from Mindscape That boy gets around: he was at PDC in LA last week! (Slight case of jealousy here.)