Alex Barnett blog : SQLServer

SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP

alexbarnett — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 21:57:00 GMT

Who woulda thunk it? The CTP for the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP will be available October 11:

"The SQL Server Driver for PHP is designed to enable reliable, scalable integration with SQL Server for PHP applications deployed on the Windows platform. The Driver for PHP is a PHP 5 extension that allows the reading and writing of SQL Server data from within PHP scripts. It provides a procedural interface for accessing data in all Editions of SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000 (including Express Edition), and makes use of PHP features, including PHP streams to read and write large objects."

CNET reports...

"Microsoft revealed some fruits of a partnership that that was announced a year ago with Zend, which develops and commercializes the open-source PHP scripting language for creating dynamic Web pages. Bill Staples, a Microsoft product unit manager, announced four moves at the ZendCon conference here:

• Microsoft is releasing a preview version of a software connector that lets PHP run atop the SQL Server 2005 database. "This is a Microsoft-developed and supported PHP driver for accessing SQL Server data from within a PHP application," Staples said."

Ah...stat time now...(my bold):

"About 70 percent of PHP developers use Windows, said Andi Gutmans, who along with Zeev Suraski are Zend's co-founders and co-CTOs. But when it comes to deploying the applications for use, customers use Linux in about 80 percent to 90 percent of cases, Suraski said."

Interview with Peter Spiro - Building Great Databases

alexbarnett — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 15:37:00 GMT

This is great video from Channel 9 - an interview with Peter Spiro, a Technical Fellow and Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft. It's probably an understatement to describe Peter's career path as "unconventional", a path that lead to him eventually to accept a role at Microsoft in 1994 within the database team as an architect, going on to manage the dev team and building SQL Server's technical team to where it is today. This is after studying Forestry and stint as a charcoal maker in Mali, West Africa.

In the interview, Peter discusses lessons learnt through his various career experiences, including the people / management skills acquired, the technical challenges involved in solving complex software problems, thoughts on leadership, mentoring & coaching and his approach to recruiting and growing technical talent. He also gets to draw his favorite data structure in the interview.

The question asked by by Bill Hill toward the end of the interview was unusual "What did nature teach you about software?"

And yes, the beard is real and according to Sam Druker is probably around 15 years old. Btw, Sam (my old boss during my stint with Data Programmability team) also appears in the video describing how Peter <didn't> recruit him into the team.

Five out of five for this one.

Dr. Peter Chen - the ER Model and ADO.NET Entity Framework - Podcast

alexbarnett — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 21:49:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago Dr Peter Chen, inventor of the Entity-Relationship model (ER model), visited the Microsoft Campus to provide a lecture sharing his thoughts on the ADO.NET Entity Framework. As we were planning his visit, he was very keen to make sure that his views could be shared with a wider audience beyond Microsoft employees, so we agree to record some sessions while on campus.

His original paper on the Entity-Relationship model (ER model), published in 1976 is one of the most cited papers in the computer software field. I was fortunate enough to have dinner with him, Sam Druker, Jose Blakeley, Britt Johnston, Erik Meijer, Pedro Cellis where we heard how his ideas on the ER model were formulated some 30 years ago. Lot's more fascinating conversation all about this history of databases, and their future too...

The next morning, I picked up Dr Chen from the hotel and drove him to the recording studio to meet with Britt, Jose and Brian Beckman where they got talking for an hour with the microphone on. Here's the podcast, hosted on Channel 9 (.mp3 here) It is superb. I mean it. If you're into 'data', you'll love it.

"Beckman interviews Dr. Chen along with Jose Blakeley, Software Architect, SQL Server, and Britt Johnston, Director of Program Management, Data Programmability. Join as we discuss the ideas behind Dr. Chen's original paper, how these concepts have subsequently influenced the software industry and database technologies, and how the ADO.NET Entity Framework is an execution runtime for the ER model."

Good news for XQuery and XSLT fans

alexbarnett — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 20:18:00 GMT

Good news for XQuery and XSLT fans - the W3C has announced the W3C Recommendations for XQuery 1.0 as an XML-aware syntax for querying collections of structured and semi-structured data both locally and over the Web and XSLT Version 2.0, a specification for transforming data model instances (XML and non-XML) into other documents. The third spec that's made Recommendation status is XPath 2.0, an expression syntax for referring to parts of XML documents.

Some of the big players behind getting these standards ratified (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft) are quoted on this testimonials page.

From the official press release:

"These new Web Standards will play a significant role in enterprise computing by connecting databases with the Web. XQuery allows data mining of everything from memos and Web service messages to multi-terabyte relational databases. XSLT 2.0 adds significant new functionality to the already widely deployed XSLT 1.0, which enables the transformation and styled presentation of XML documents. Both specifications rely on XPath 2.0, also significantly enriched from its previous version.
..."This is a red-letter day for XSLT users," said Michael Kay, editor of the XSLT 2.0 specification, "both for those who have been waiting patiently for this Recommendation to appear before they could use the new features, and for those who have taken a gamble by deploying the new technology before its final stamp of approval. Our biggest achievement, in my view, has been to deliver a huge step forward in functionality and developer productivity, while also retaining a very high level of backwards compatibility, thereby keeping transition costs to the minimum."

But not everyone agrees XQuery is slam dunk. Ex Microsoftee 'Derek' in this November post on hearing the news of the proposed recommendations, wrote at the time:

"I just noticed, XSLT 2.0, XML Query and XPath 2.0 Are Proposed Recommendations. Since leaving MS, I've stopped tracking these. It baffles me that XQuery is only just now 'shipping'. This + the-mess-that-is-XSD spell the doom of XML. This isn't just doom, like the Outlook spell-checker would try an correct the DOM to; this is real doom. These standards to too complicated and too late
...I honestly think we would be better without XQuery. Let the vendors think for themselves and see what customers actually use. XQuery is a standard looking for a use, which is backward and guaranteed to produce a problematic result.
XSLT/XPath 2.0 is a harder one... There are a couple things that XSLT 2.0 adds that were desperately needed vs XSLT 1.0. But I've managed a team implementing a commercial quality XSLT 1.0 implementation and that was a huge amount of work. XSLT 2.0 is at least 4x as much work. That is terrifying. Why not just 'fix' XSLT 1.0? It would be dramatically less work, and provide 80% of the gains, at 10% the cost."

Generally however, the reaction I've seen to the news seems fairly positive. Kimbro Staken never thought he'd see the day. Jonathan Robbie of DataDirect seems chuffed (mind you, his cmapny has been a member of XML Query WG). Alex Miller seems happy too (he's at BEA).

Bob Beauchemin, SQL Server MVP is speculating on the impact this news will have on the Microsoft SQL Server future product line:

"Although SQL Server 2005's XML data type doesn't exactly follow the XQuery 1.0/XPath 2.0 Data Model, rumor has it that the next version of the ISO/ANSI SQL spec (SQL2007?) may have some something to say about this, as well as something to say about XQuery in general. Right now, the SQL2003 spec doesn't specify a query language. [also a view shared by Matija Lah]
It will also be interesting to see what the SQL Server folks do with regards to updates to support the new specs in the next release, and support of a larger portion of the language constructs."

Given that Michael Rys (who also posted on this news) is a member of the SQL Server product team and has been closely involved in the relevant standards Working Groups, I think Bob's speculation may be justified... :-)

Astrophysicist-turned-Programming-Language-Designer

admin — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 09:27:00 GMT

In my first week with the Data Programmability team, my new manager suggested I set up a bunch of introductory meetings with some of the team members. One of the very first of these meetings was with Software Architect Brian Beckman. I spent an hour with him and was totally blown away.

This is Brian, holding a copy of the 'Towards 2020" report published by Microsoft Research that he contributed to this year:

As I was sitting and listening to Brian's stream of consciousness I felt like I was watching a live 3D version of a Channel 9 video. At the end of our chat I asked him if he wouldn't mind me asking Charles Torre of Channel 9 to interview him. I really wanted others to have the chance to hear him talk. He happily agreed and the end result is now up for downloading on Channel 9. It's a large download but worth it - you'll be thoroughly entertained.

Brian is a cosmologist / astrophysicist / quantum physicist / academic-turned-programming language designer (!). His bookshelf is one of the more unusual you'll see around campus in terms of the mix (and is the only person I know other than me to own a Steve Wolfram book (I have A New Kind of Science - an extraordinary work).

He spent his early career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) researching nutty stuff such as the Time Warp Operating System and virtual time theory, distributed computing - running the Game of Life and virtual billiards on parallel processors, and developing War Game simulators for government (a little bit like the Game of Life, but more of a Game of Death involving large-scale nuclear warhead deployments and massive Soviet troop and tank maneuver scenarios: think of it as Sims Massively-Accelerated-Anti-Evolution Edition)...

Brian joined the Microsoft Research team years ago (before it was known as MSR) and today leads the our research and product incubation efforts in the Data Programmability team. He loves his functional programming languages: Haskell (Erik Meijer is one of Haskell's designers and is also in Brian's team) and Scheme. And he loves his Monads: Erik and Brian jointly wrote 'The Return of the Monoids' (not a science-fiction horror script, but research paper). As an example of what Brian does today, he was involved in the development of the Entity Data Model (EDM) into ADO.NET. This technology recently saw the light of day in ADO.NET Entity Framework CTP), with Brian taking on the role of translating the theoretical and mathematical models of EDM developed by the research team into coded concepts the product teams could interpret and then develop the technology for ADO.NET, SQL Server, and Visual Studio. In our first meeting we spent some time discussing the dynamic languages Ruby, Python and Perl - the great news for me was that he was very familiar with these and is actually quite a big fan of them although his day-to-day attention is focused on VB.NET as you can see from the video.

Mr Beckman collects calculators. He showed me one I've never see before - the CURTA Calculator. (The story behind its invention is as amazing as the device itself.)

He also show me this:

...which he has programmed to print out these:

His desktop scientific print calculator simply crunches out prime numbers, all day long, every day and has done for years.

Each new prime takes a little longer to calculate than the previous prime. Currently it takes about 6 hours to work out the next prime number. Earlier this year our team ran an internal competition - ADO.NET Idol: it's simple: the coolest app developed by a member the DP / SQL team using the ADO.NET vNext / EDM stack wins. Brian won it by developing an full-on emulator of the print calculator, GUI and all, programming each of the calculator's functions into a virtual ADO.NET vNext calculator to calculate and print out the prime numbers (at a considerably faster rate than the real calculator of course...). For fun.

Anyway, along with Brian and Erik and loads of others on the team, I've always plenty to learn each day around here...

Why am I moving my blog?

admin — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 17:43:00 GMT

I finally got around to sorting out my new 'Alex Barnett blog' on alexbarnett.net!

About my new blog

I'm using Telligent's Community Server (the recently released 2.1 version) and running very nicely thanks to the good folks at ASPnix (my new host - they know CS inside out, so *perfect* for supporting set up, and rectifiying my mistakes :-) plus excellent SQL Server support...I can even use SQL Server Management Studio to manage my own DBs (Express Edition here) hosted at ASPnix- sweet). Full FTP access to CS files, the lot.

The CS server has more than blogware (the same blogware running the blogs.msdn.com and blogs.technet.com blogs and the recently in-the-news Dell blog): it has forums, photos and files stuff and is used to run large community sites (e.g. ASP.NET, NetFx3 (btw, have checked out the new CTP release for .NET Framework 3.0?). CS is also used by a bunch of individual bloggers too, e.g. Larry Hyrb aka Xbox Live's Major Nelson and another blogger who's been in my OPML file for a while, Jason Knight.

Apart from the fact that you can customize (at code-level if you want) CS to you heart's content - no pun intended - the best part is that the 'Express' edition is free. Talking of customization, I settled on a pic I took in Yellowstone and got the blog looking pretty much as I want it (thanks to my sister Natasha who helped out on the CSS decyphering and styling). I'm using the 'Paperclip' theme as the base template - I might post up details later on how this was pimped. Anyway, what do you think?

I've also been able to use the new RSS / Atom / feeds syndication ('Mirror') features in CS 2.1 allowing the alexbarnett.net/blog to syndicate posts from my MSDN blog (more on this here). Hopefully once MSDN / TechNet / Communities team updates their instance of CS to 2.1 I can do the reverse (hmmm...need to think that one through though). In effect, my Feedburner subscribers don't have to change a thing (you see, there a was masterplan all along ;-)

Does this sound like an ad for Community Server and ASPnix?

I suppose so, but I'm just so pleased to be able to run my own blog as mine now. I'll be updating the MSDN blog from time to time for pure Microsoft releated stuff as I've still got a load of subscribers on the old RSS / Atom feed, so I'll have to provide those subscibers some gentle reminders to move over to my Feedburner feed. Plus the old feed is feeding the MSDN blogs aggregate feed that is syndicated pretty widely, so I should still use it to some degree.

Why am I moving my blog?

Well, there's something about knowing that your thoughts are hosted on your employer's infrastructure that I think has tended to constrain my writing somewhat - not much, but enough to be aware of it as I blog. And not because of company policy (i.e. 'blog smart').

While on MSDN, I always got a slight guilty feeling whenever I posted about purely personal or technical but non-Microsoft related stuff. I know there are bunch of posts I've written or wanted to write but didn't because I'm on 'official' territory.

Does that mean that my personal thoughts to be published on my new blog can't be intepreted as the words of a Microsoft employee, just because they live on my personal domain? No, I'm not thinking that at all.

If there's one thing we're all learning as 'Microsoft bloggers' is that what you write is considered a view of a Microsoft employee and therefore is quoteable and abusable as evidence of Microsoft's position on a matter. It doesn't matter how much you point out disclaimers (ah, that reminds me! I should add one to my personal blog...) that "your views are you own and not those of your employers' ", that fact it is that it is the perception that counts. Even as I write this post and know that I'm publishing from my new blog on a non-Microsoft-owned site, I am aware of my contractual agreement with my employer, I am aware the information that I know of but can't share publicly and the conversations with colleagues that cannot be made public. While at Microsoft, Robert Scoble and others regularly reminded us of that. This exit video of Scoble on Channel 9 is must-see viewing for any blogger in my view (most people are employed by somebody) - he talks about the fact that everytime he blogged he was very aware of the associated risks. I was sad to see him go - he taught me and the rest of us a lot about this topic. The fact that you might think that I'm writing 'on behalf of Microsoft' (which is not the case :-P ) is a fact that any blogging employee of any company needs to be mindful of. Blog smart in other words.

I've been blogging on MSDN since December 2003 (and on other blogs before that). It has been a great platform to get the feet wet on the 'corporate' blogging front and the Community team as well as the MSDN team that orginally got things going have been amazing in supporting the Microsoft blogging efforts, and they still are. As I say, I'll still be blogging there occasionally (on the Data Programmability team blogs (Data, ADO.NET, XML Team and SQL Protocols).

All the pieces of me

So here I am...in another part of cyberspace, playing with yet more stuff.

But at least this place, I hope to call home for while at least, is my place - where I connect all the distributed pieces of me. So it's not an MSDN gig, it's not a Live Space, it's my place. Let's see where I end up, here.

There is one downside though, a minor one, but only because I'm a competitive moron (but I'm not the only one...). You see, the blog traffic numbers at Microsoft are published each month internally and there is a little friendly competition among a few on the monthly numbers (most, quite rightly, don't care about these pv's and aggregate views and rankings), so, alas, I'm giving that game up. A good thing I'm sure...

Whatever, dude...

Eeesh...I'm writing this as if I'm making some kind of major life change! But blogging has been a big part of me for some years now, so moving from one blog to another feels like major deal to me. Anyway, enough of this nonsense! Enjoy the new blog!

P.S. Feel free to update your blogrolls :-)

Connecting to my SQL Server db

admin — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 02:10:00 GMT

This is cool. I've connected to my SQL Server db created for running the Community Server (2.1) on ASPnix using Microsoft SQL Management Studio.

Now also testing the tags feature on CS 2.1 - adding the 'SQL' and 'SQLServer' (seperated by ';').