Project 31-A

Knowing your data might be the most important quality of the new database administrator (DBA). Just like a marketing person needs to know their customers, a CEO needs to know their market; a DBA needs to truly understand their data. This article is about how knowing your data becomes even more important with cloud databases like SQL Azure Database , and NoSQL style data stores like Cassandra and Windows Azure Storage . SQL Server Using a scale up approach for your on-premise SQL Server database, the SQL Server DBA needed: A good working understanding behind the relationships of the data, i.e. how tables related to each other. This allowed the DBA to develop foreign key to primary key relationships, one of the mantras of a relational database. Understanding how data was being inserted and updated into the table allowed the DBA to optimize their queries for locking, partitions for performance, and transaction logs for growth. Understanding how data was queried from th...

  Scaling up an on-premise SQL Server is the concept of adding more computing resources to your existing hardware, like memory, processing power or storage. The purpose is to allow your SQL Server to handle more queries, gain performance or store more data. When you do decided to go to the cloud you should realize that SQL Azure doesn’t scale up like SQL Server – it scales out. Scaling out is adding additional machines with the same data and dividing the computation between them. This article will discuss the differences between scaling up and scaling out and how you need to plan for scale out on SQL Azure to gain performance. Due to hardware and licensing costs of SQL Server, it is much easier to add resources to existing hardware, than it is to deploy an additional replicated SQL Server on new hardware to gain performance.   The problem with scaling out (adding more machines) in an on-premise SQL Server installation is that this adds a degree of complexity to the des...

This is a catchall for any kind of Windows Phone 7 resource for developers. If you have a favorite resource you would like added to the list, add it to the comments and I will update the list. MSFT Blogs Windows Phone Developer Blog Jesse Liberty, Silverlight Mike Ormond, UK David Anson Chris Koenig Jaime Rodriguez Jeff Wilcox Pete Brown Scott Guthrie Shawn Oster James Conard John Papa MSFT Sites Windows Phone developer resources (main landing page) http://bit.ly/h6B0MN Silverlight for Windows Phone http://bit.ly/hZHv3e XNA Game Studio and XNA Framework http://bit.ly/f0vzAI Windows Phone Developer Tools and Device Unlock http://bit.ly/fEv2Gd User Experience and User Interface http://bit.ly/e9BcQ7 Application and Execution Model http://bit.ly/dJ1Kg2 Input, Touch and Gestures http://bit.ly/erTdpa Launchers and Choosers http://bit.ly/hgCoRo Security http://bit.ly/evDf4S...

There is a long standing pattern with sport teams of all types: The Team Members The Team Captain The Team Coach The Team Manager This pattern is well established, and it is well accepted that one bad apple in the above can change a champion team into a loser. Development should learn from this pattern. The following appear to be appropriate mappings by functions and roles served: Team Captain –> Dev Lead. The best member with leadership ability. The person that the team members have confidence in and respects. Someone good in the sport (development) Team Coach –> Architect. A coach plans out and teaches the plays. He makes the call on what should happen on the field. Team Manager –> The Development Manager. He is responsible for getting resources (including new people),  dealing with the sponsors etc. My general observation is that most development teams are crippling themselves by trying to save money by overloading positions. The cons...

The default worker role created by Visual Studio 2010 generates code that only leverages a single thread in your compute instance. Using that generated code, if you make synchronous network requests to SQL Azure or to a web service (for example via REST), your dedicated core for the instance becomes underutilized while it waits for the response from the network. One technique is to use the asynchronous functions in ADO.NET and the HTTPWebRequest classes to offload the work to the background worker. For more information about asynchronous calls read: Asynchronous Programming Design Patterns . Another technique that I will cover in this blog post is how to start up multiple threads, each for a dedicated task, for this purpose I have coded a multi-threaded framework to use in your worker role.   Goals of the framework: Remain true to the design of the RoleEntryPoint class, the main class called by the Windows Azure instance, so that you don’t have to redesign your code. ...

Some of us are running really small web sites on Windows Azure, and for every web site it seems that I needed to do a little background processing. Usually, this means creating both a web role to handle the web requests and a worker role to the background processing – typically through separate Visual Studio projects. However for a small web site this can get expensive if you are not fully utilizing the resources of both instances.   This article is going to show you how to include your background processing into your web role so you can fully utilize the Windows Azure instance. The same background processing that you would typically do in a worker role.   The recommended approach for Windows Azure is always run two instances to maximize uptime – if you were to follow the recommendation you would have the web role plus the extra background work running twice. Which means you need to design your background work to run Idempotency. For more information read: Idempotency ...