An Exciting Year...

2008 is going to be an exciting year...

Firstly, Windows 2008 and SQL Server 2008 will be launched! Can't wait!

The only little shout is that I will miss the local launch, as I will be busy travelling to India and Europe during the launch period.

It has been 5 years since I started on my current journey and career.

I believe strongly in re-evaluating career objectives every 5 years ...
Thus, this is the year when I will wrap up the final pieces of my current journey and move on...

A lot of people have asked me when/where will I move on to. I think that is not important. What is important is that I will still be actively contributing and deeply involved in advancing the state-of-art within the databsae community...

The SQL Server 08 journey...

Gosh! It has been such a long time since I blogged.

Since the talks on spatial support in SQL Server 2008, it has spun off to many other deep dive talks and videos on spatial indexing, queries and building .Net applications/mashups with the spatial data.

Much of the talk on spatial stuffs feels deja vu. For the early part of my career, I have been working on efficient alogrithms for spatial joins for data streams. More specifically, my work have focussed on solving the problem of delivering the results of a spatial joins progressively to the end-users, so that they do not have to wait a long time for the entire results to be computed.
This is important towards supporting interactive applications, where the users want to rely on the intial results of the query to determine whether they want to continue waiting or to refine the query filter predicates so that the results are relevant.

In Sept last year, when Chewy approached me about a possible avenue to play with SQL Spatial, I said yes immediately. And thus begun the re-discovering of an old love within SQL Server 08. ;)

Past months (Nov, Dec, Jan) I have been actively involved in sharing about the new features/enhancements to the community and partners. Thus , the lack in posts! ;) I am back in action, and will be very active sharing with everyone the salient aspects of SQL Server 2008 which makes it a robust data platform for enterprises.

Very exciting stuffs coming up!

SQL Server 2008 - Demos on Spatial Data

In preparing for the recent MSDN Techtalk on the support of spatial queries in SQL Server 2003, I created a simple demo ASP.Net application, powered by SQL Server 2008, and Virtual Earth.

In this demo, I downloaded earthquake data (latitude, longitude, depth, magnitude, location)

from http://earthquake.usgs.gov/, and loaded them into SQL Server. In SQL Server 2008, two new data types were introduced to store spatial data. I defined a column based on the geography data type, and then loaded the latitude and logitude of the epicenters of each earthquake into the column.

When a user decides that he/she wishes to visit a country for a holiday, the user can then make use of the application to check the earthquakes that have happened in the region. In order to do that, the user selects a location. This location translate to a given point (latitude/longitude). By using a spatial query which retrieves all data that are of a given distance to the holiday point. The data that are retrieved are then plotted out using the Microsoft Virtual Earth.

You can try it out at this site...

http://labs.innovativesingapore.com/

Click the link

SQL Server 2008 - Handling Spatial Data

Recently, I gave a talk at the MSDN TechTalk in Singapore on the support for spatial queries in SQL Server 2008. Very exciting stuffs...

Check out Chewy's blog for the slides
http://verychewy.com/archive/2007/10/17/follow-up-materials-msdn-techtalk-day-oct-2007.aspx

Over the new few months, I will also be sharing about the new BI features in SQL Server 2008.
Remember to download the CTP to try it out.

Gosh! I am back!

Gosh! It has been a long time since I posted on this blog.

Since Jun, it had been an eventful journey. My son, Nat, was born. And have been juggling hard between him, my work, and all the community talks. Now that things have stabilize, it's time to get back to sharing about all the cool SQL gems that I have uncovered.

At the same time, I was trying out some not-published SQL Server stuffs, and hence I can't post much details in the blog until it becomes public. Happy to say that, I can finally share the exciting SQL Server 2008 stuffs that I have been playing with.. Watch out for it in the Oct MSDN TechTalk..

If you have not tried SQL Server 2008 yet, check it out!

Sync Services Resources

If you are looking at using Sync Services, check out the following resources.

Using SyncAdapterBuilder
Demo I: Offline Application - SyncAdapterBuilder

Author SyncAdapter manually using TSQL statements and stored procedures
Demo II: Offline Application - TSQL+SProcs

Setup N-Tier using web services
Demo III: Offline Application - WebService

Conflict detection and resolution
Demo VI: Offline Application - Conflict Handling

Using sync services against Oracle database
Demo V: Offline Application - Oracle Backend

Tracking changes without changing the schema of the base table
by using a separate tracking table
Demo IV: Offline Application - Decoupled Change Tracking

BI on Windows Mobile

Recently, I have been sharing about the merits of using SQL Server Compact Edition, and how it provides a unified data storage solution for both mobile devices as well as desktop scenarios. In addition, one of the advantages of using SQL Server Compact Edition is how it can support applications which are occasionally connected.

Was thinking if we could push a scaled-down version of Analysis Services (light-weight data mining algorithms) onto the SQL Server Compact Edition, it will provide BI on the move!

The key idea is to use SQL Server Compact Edition as the data store, and have an Analysis Services-like layer that can stores the light-weight data mining model in SQL Server Compact Edition. The data mining model can then used to make predictions. Whenever SQL Server Comapct Edition is connected, it can make use of Sync Services to sync with the data mining model residing in SQL Server.

Just some thots...

BI Book

I am interested to write a book focussing on Transform Data Into Insights: Business Intelligence using SQL Server 2005.

Wonder whether there are like-minded folks who are keen to work on the book together...
Do drop me a beep.

Monitoring performance of SSIS Data Flow

Recently, a friend was asking me how to estimate as well as monitor the performance of the SSIS packages.

Check out
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/
ssisperf.mspx#EKBAC

http://www.scalabilityexperts.com/default.asp?action=article&ID=167

You can monitor the performance of the data flow engine in SSIS too. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms137622(SQL.90).aspx

Very useful stuffs!

Microsoft Mobile and Embedded Devcon (MEDC) 2007

If you have been always interested in building applications for the Windows Mobile and Windows Embedded platforms, check out MEDC 2007 for the latest in Mobile and embedded devices technology.

Date: 8 June 2007 (Friday)
Time: 8.30am - 5.30pm
Venue: Suntec City Convention Center Ballroom 2-3

Amongst the many exciting topics at MEDC (Mobile 6.0, DirectX and Game development for Windows Mobile 6.0, etc), I will be sharing about the new SQL Server Compact Edition, and how you can make use of it as a unified data store (from mobile devices to desktop).

Check it out if you are in Singapore!

Potential of using Data Mining Tools in SQL Server 2005 to save lives

Check out

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=49173

on how Clalit Health Services make use of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Data Mining to preserve health and save lives.

Over the past 2 years, I am been sharing the immense potential of data mining to various participants at MS TechReady events, community launch and usergroups gatherings.

Data mining definitely offers a lot of potential to allow end users to discover previously unknown patterns in the huge amount of data they have amassed in the organization.

If you have not checked out the data mining algorithms available in Analysis Services, do check it out today!