Windows Server 2008

In the Who do you want to see interviewed next? blog post I asked for some names of people who YOU would like to see interviewed. Erland Sommarskog's name was submitted in comments a couple of times. I contacted Erland and am happy to anounce that he has agreed to do this.

The first time I heard of Erland Sommarskog was in the SQL Server programming newsgroups. I also read all the articles on his site. When I answer questions I usually give the link out to these 4 articles

Arrays and Lists in SQL Server

Implementing Error Handling with Stored Procedures

Error Handling in SQL Server – a Background

and of course The curse and blessings of dynamic SQL

I always wondered why he didn't write a SQL book. Hey, now I can ask him that  :-)

Before you think of any questions please visit Erland's page first (http://www.sommarskog.se/index.html) and read some of the articles he wrote.

You can submit questions until Monday May 12th and then I will forward the questions to Erland.

Since the launch of Windows Server 2008 on February 27, I have had a phenomenal opportunity to hear a lot of positive feedback from IT Pros, developers and our partners.  I truly have enjoyed talking with customers from around the globe to hear their experiences and implementations. 

Since I am back in the office for the foreseeable future I thought I would take some time over the next couple of weeks to showcase some of the implementations of Windows Server 2008 that I have come across that have caught my attention.

One customer who has seen great results in the Web hosting area with WS08 is HostMySite.com. If you are not familiar with this company - they are a Web hosting company that owns and operates its own datacenters and networks and provides support for dedicated server environments.  HostyMySite hosts more than 85,000 web sites on 3,100 Servers (and growing).

One of the initial goals of their WS08 deployment was to offer the highest levels of application stability to their customers.  In addition HostMySite wanted to increase the site capacity on their web servers and minimize the amount of time spent troubleshooting.

Prior to Windows Server 2008 HostMySite was getting roughly 500 application pools on each of their servers. IIS 7.0 new application pool management features has allowed HMS to scale up to 3000 application pools per server.  In addition to increased application pool capacity, HMS was also able to reduce the numbers of servers.....what normally took 10 servers now takes 4.  (Although I wish WS08 was solely responsible for that metric - they moved to Dual Core Dell PowerEdge Servers)  Both of these are very impressive to step back and take a look at: 6x the application capacity on 60% less servers.

HostMySite is just one of the many customers seeing strong results with Windows Server 2008 and you can read more about their deployment story here.....it is actually a good read and you will see they are doing a lot more with the remote management capabilities of IIS 7.0

If you want more info on IIS, be sure to visit IIS.net. There is also a great blog post here that talks more about the hosting features in IIS 7.0.

Stay tuned for more.....
 
-Ward Ralston

In the Who do you want to see interviewed next? blog post I asked for some names of people who YOU would like to see interviewed. Craig Freedman's name was submitted in comments a couple of times. I contacted Craig and am happy to anounce that he has agreed to do this.

Before you think of any questions please visit Craig's blog first(http://blogs.msdn.com/craigfr/) to get a feel of what kind of questions to ask. It would make sense to keep the questions focused on query processing, query execution, and query plans. I told Craig that if he doesn't like a question that he does not have to answer it.

You can submit questions until Monday May 12th and then I will forward the questions to Craig

I answered this question on the MSDN forums: How can I search all my sprocs to see if any use a function?
Several people suggested using sp_depends. You can't really depend on sp_depends because of deferred name resolution. Take a look at this

First create this proc

now create this function

result: Object does not reference any object, and no objects reference it.

Most people will not create a proc before they have created the function. So when does this behavior rear its ugly head? When you script out all the objects in a database, if the function or any objects referenced by an object are created after the object that references them then sp_depends won't be 100% correct

SQL Server 2005 makes it pretty easy to do it yourself

BTW somefuction is not a type, I already had a somefunction but was too lazy to change more than one character