Just before departing for SQLConnections in Vegas and SQLBits in London, I got notified that I’ve been selected for two presentations at the Norwegian Developers Conference in Oslo, June 6-8th!
I’ve never been to NDC before but I’ve heard lots of good stuff, as well as seen various clips from the recorded videos. I’m especially excited to participate in a developer oriented conference, given that I’ve been focusing most of my time on SQL Server dedicated events over the last year. Lots of interesting new people and sessions to see!
As mentioned, I’ll be presenting two sessions:
Revealing the SQL Server Magic
Think SQL Server is magical? You’re right! However, there’s some sense to the magic, and that’s what I’ll show you in this extremely deep dive session.
Through my work in creating OrcaMDF, an open source parser for SQL Server databases, I’ve learned a lot of internal details for the SQL Server database file format. In this session, I will walk you through the internal storage format of MDF files, how we might go about parsing a complete database ourselves, using nothing but a hex editor.
I will cover how SQL Server stores its own internal metadata about objects, how it knows where to find your data on disk, and once it finds it, how to read it. Using the knowledge from this session, you’ll get a solid understanding of the basics behind SQL Server storage.
This is the same session that I’ll be presenting at SQLBits next Saturday. However, given the audience I will be modifying the session to focus more on the development side of things.
Running SQL Server on Amazon EC2
SQL Azure is awesome, if you’re in the Microsoft cloud. But what are your options if you’re using the Amazon cloud?
I’ll introduce the available database options at Amazon and segue into setting up SQL Server on EC2 using EBS for storage. While EBS is great, it needs to be handled with care to ensure not only proper performance, but also to avoid the inevitable cloud instability and varying performance metrics.
How far can we push it, and what are the gotchas you need to be aware of?